Evolution of Green Vehicle Routing Problem: A Bibliometric and Visualized Review

The Green Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) has garnered considerable attention as a prominent subject within the field of green logistics. Scholars, organizations, and legislators have dedicated substantial efforts to comprehensively investigate and implement solutions for this problem. To thoroughly understand the research status in this field, this paper provides a bibliometric review of all-round GVRPs between 2000 and 2021 based on 1230 publications filtered from the Web of Science Core Collection with the help of CiteSpace V5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.13. The results of bibliometric features analyses indicate that GVRP has entered into a stage of prosperity in the past decade, and over 2500 researchers from 72 countries and regions have contributed to the development of this field. Furthermore, combining the keywords and co-citation analyses, we obtain nine subfields of GVRP, elaborate their study content evolution history, and accordingly apply the research potential evaluation model to envisage its future directions. The findings show that fuel consumption and electric vehicles are major research hotspots with the most optimistic prospects, and cold chain logistics, which has both high maturity and high recent attention, is the current mainstream of GVRP. The findings may provide guidance for future research in this field.