Research on green vehicle scheduling problem of free picking up and delivering customers for airlines ticketing company

Abstract

In this paper, the vehicle scheduling and routing problem of airline ticketing companies which provide free services of picking customers up and delivering them to airports is studied. Taking the time window constraints, customer satisfaction and time-dependent factors into consideration, this paper presents the mathematical model which take minimizing vehicle use cost and carbon emission as its objectives. According to the characteristics of the problem, a hybrid algorithm, which combines heuristic and tabu search algorithms, is designed to solve the model. Then, a simulated numerical case is employed to verify the validity of the mathematical model and the hybrid algorithm. The simulating experiments about the numerical case show that by the model and the hybrid algorithm a vehicle scheduling and routing plan can be found with significant reduction in carbon emission and without clear increase of the total vehicle operational cost compared to the plan by the traditional approach. This shows that the vehicle scheduling and routing plan found by the approach proposed in this paper is more environmentally friendly and does not significantly increase total vehicle operational cost of the company.