Abstract
The CO2 emission of transportation is significantly reduced by the employment of green vehicles to the existing vehicle fleet of the organizations. This paper intends to optimize the composition of conventional and green vehicles for a logistics distribution problem operating under a carbon emission cap imposed by the government. The underlying problem involves product delivery by the vehicles starting from a single depot to geographically distributed customers. The delivery occurs within specified time windows. To solve the proposed problem, we design a hybrid metaheuristic solution based on ant colony optimization (ACO) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithms. Extensive computational experiments have been performed on newly generated problem instances and benchmark problem instances adopted from the literature. The proposed hybrid ACO is proven to be superior to the state-of-the-art algorithms available in the literature. We obtain 21 new best-known solutions out of 56 benchmark instances of vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The proposed mixed fleet model obtains the best composition of conventional and green vehicles with a 6.90% reduced amount of CO2 emissions compared to the case when the fleet consists of conventional vehicles only.
Highlights
Transportation in business logistics has a two-faced contribution to countries
The main contribution of this paper is to present a mixed fleet of logistics problem comprising conventional vehicles and green vehicles with CO2 emission cap in the network
A VRP with soft time windows (VRPSTW) problem was addressed in a study where two exact algorithms such as standard branch-and-cut-and-price and bi-objective optimization based on the bisection method were designed to solve the problem [25]
Summary
Transportation in business logistics has a two-faced contribution to countries. It generates approximately 5.00% of GDP in countries [1]. Company logistics will become more common with the mixed vehicle fleet for their operations in the near future Green vehicles, such as electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and hydrogen vehicles, offer the advantage of reduced CO2 emissions compared to conventional vehicles. We study an optimization problem of a mixed fleet of vehicle routing problems with time windows under a CO2 emission cap. The CO2 emission cap for the distribution problem, vehicle capacity, and time window of each customer are considered as constraints for this optimization problem. This study is motivated by many observations, such as world leaders’ pledge to achieve sustainable transportation, including green vehicles to the companies’ vehicle fleets, and the imposition of a CO2 emission cap in the distribution networks. The main contribution of this paper is to present a mixed fleet of logistics problem comprising conventional vehicles and green vehicles with CO2 emission cap in the network.
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