Stochastic dynamic inventory-routing: A comprehensive review

The stochastic dynamic inventory-routing problem (SDIRP) is a fundamental problem within supply chain operations that integrates inventory management and vehicle routing while handling the stochastic and dynamic nature of exogenous factors unveiled over time, such as customer demands, inventory supply and travel times. While practical applications require dynamic and stochastic decision-making, research in this field has only recently experienced significant growth, with most inventory-routing literature focusing on static variants. This paper reviews the current state of research on SDIRPs, identifying critical gaps and highlighting emerging trends in problem settings and decision policies. We extend the existing inventory-routing taxonomies by incorporating additional problem characteristics to better align models with real-world contexts. As a result, we highlight the need to account for further sources of uncertainty, multiple-supplier networks, perishability, multiple objectives, and pickup and delivery operations. We further categorize each study based on its policy design, investigating how different problem aspects shape decision policies. To conclude, we emphasize that large-scale and real-time problems require more attention and can benefit from decomposition approaches and learning-based methods.