While Vehicle Routing Problems have now been studied extensively for more than 50 years, those in which some parameters are uncertain at the time where the routes are made have received significantly less attention, in spite of the fact that there are many real-life settings where key parameters are not known with certainty.

In this seminar, we will first examine the main classes of Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problems: problems with stochastic demands, stochastic customers, and stochastic service or travel times. We will also emphasize the main approaches for modeling and tackling uncertainty: a priori models, a posteriori approaches, and chance-constrained models. We will discuss, as well, the most popular approaches for solving stochastic VRPs. The second part of the seminar will be devoted to a presentation of some interesting research directions in this area.