Maritime inventory routing: recent trends and future directions

We review recent literature pertaining to the maritime inventory routing problem (MIRP), a stimulating, albeit niche, subclass of vendor‐managed inventory problems. MIRPs deal with optimally distributing products with a (typically heterogeneous) vessel fleet between production and consumption ports with inventory tracking and inventory limits. We present two mixed‐integer linear programming models for the MIRP—one based on discrete time, the other based on continuous time—and we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of the two modeling approaches. In surveying more than 50 papers spanning the decade 2013–2023, we investigate MIRP variants from many different applications and discuss how these have been modeled and solved. Our purpose is to provide a comprehensive overview of state‐of‐the‐art MIRP research published in this period, collated along multiple dimensions. In addition to providing information about available test instances, we highlight recent trends and interesting avenues for future research. As such, we believe this survey will be useful to students, researchers, and practitioners in this domain.