Survey of Green Vehicle Routing Problem: Past and future trends

•To reflect the environmental sensitivity of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP).•To review the studies on VRP in energy consumption, emissions, reverse logistics.•To identify Green Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) and its classification.•To suggest the future research directions in GVRP.

Green Logistics has emerged as the new agenda item in supply chain management. The traditional objective of distribution management has been upgraded to minimizing system-wide costs related to economic and environmental issues. Reflecting the environmental sensitivity of vehicle routing problems (VRP), an extensive literature review of Green Vehicle Routing Problems (GVRP) is presented. We provide a classification of GVRP that categorizes GVRP into Green-VRP, Pollution Routing Problem, VRP in Reverse Logistics, and suggest research gaps between its state and richer models describing the complexity in real-world cases. The purpose is to review the most up-to-date state-of-the-art of GVRP, discuss how the traditional VRP variants can interact with GVRP and offer an insight into the next wave of research into GVRP. It is hoped that OR/MS researchers together with logistics practitioners can be inspired and cooperate to contribute to a sustainable industry.