Carbon pricing initiatives-based bi-level pollution routing problem

Abstract

The pollution-routing problem aims to route a number of vehicles and determines their speeds on each route segment to minimize total cost, including fuel, emission and driver costs. Recently, carbon pricing initiatives have been widely implemented worldwide. With consideration of the interactions between carbon pricing initiatives and freight schedules, this paper presents a carbon pricing initiatives-based bi-level pollution routing problem involving an authority and a freight company. An interactive solution approach integrating a fuzzy logic controlled particle swarm optimization and a modified adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic is designed to search for solutions for the carbon pricing initiatives-based bi-level pollution routing problem. Computational experiments and analysis are then conducted to shed light on the influence of carbon pricing initiatives on carbon emissions and the total cost of freight companies. In this part, extended models for the carbon pricing initiatives-based bi-level pollution routing problem with a freight company delivering to multiple regions and with multiple freight companies are proposed and computed using the algorithms based on the interactive solution approach. The results indicate that the proposed method can promote freight company improvements in emission performance, and assist authorities in making decisions for road freight transport carbon emission reduction.