  Over the past two decades, equity aspects have been considered in a growing
number of models and methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Equity
concerns most often relate to fairly allocating workloads and to balancing the
utilization of resources, and many practical applications have been reported in
the literature. However, there has been only limited discussion about how
workload equity should be modeled in VRPs, and various measures for optimizing
such objectives have been proposed and implemented without a critical
evaluation of their respective merits and consequences.
  This article addresses this gap with an analysis of classical and alternative
equity functions for biobjective VRP models. In our survey, we review and
categorize the existing literature on equitable VRPs. In the analysis, we
identify a set of axiomatic properties that an ideal equity measure should
satisfy, collect six common measures, and point out important connections
between their properties and those of the resulting Pareto-optimal solutions.
To gauge the extent of these implications, we also conduct a numerical study on
small biobjective VRP instances solvable to optimality. Our study reveals two
undesirable consequences when optimizing equity with nonmonotonic functions:
Pareto-optimal solutions can consist of non-TSP-optimal tours, and even if all
tours are TSP optimal, Pareto-optimal solutions can be workload inconsistent,
i.e. composed of tours whose workloads are all equal to or longer than those of
other Pareto-optimal solutions. We show that the extent of these phenomena
should not be underestimated. The results of our biobjective analysis are valid
also for weighted sum, constraint-based, or single-objective models. Based on
this analysis, we conclude that monotonic equity functions are more appropriate
for certain types of VRP models, and suggest promising avenues for further
research.
