In vehicle routing problems (VRPs) the decisions to be taken concern the assignment of customers to vehicles and the sequencing of the customers assigned to each vehicle. Additional decisions may need to be jointly taken, depending on the specific problem setting. In this paper, after discussing the different kinds of decisions taken in different classes of VRPs, the class where the decision about when the routes start from the depot has to be taken is considered and the related literature is reviewed. This class of problems, that we call VRPs over time, includes the periodic routing problems, the inventory routing problems, the vehicle routing problems with release dates, and the multi-trip vehicle routing problems.