The green dynamic vehicle routing problem in sustainable transport

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a complex and high-level set of routing problems. Two of its important variants are the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) and the Green Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP). The first one has become a challenging research topic in the last two decades, in which not all informations are known in advance, but are revealed as the system progresses. The second one is seen as a new application and solution in new logistics patterns, more specifically, for finding routes of vehicles to serve a set of customers while minimizing the total amount of CO 2 emissions, by increasing the loading rate and reducing the number of empty trips could reduce from 10% to 40% km traveled and therefore CO 2 emissions [1]. In this paper, we combine these two variants (DVRP and GVRP), where we try to minimize, in the dynamic environment, the greenhouse gas especially the carbon dioxide CO 2 , which is the immediate consequence of the depletion of the ozone layer and time duration. We will call this combination the Dynamic Green Vehicle Routing Problem (DGVRP). To study this new problem, we present the technique employed to estimate the amount of CO 2 emissions, the emission matrix and integrate them into the DGVRP model, then we propose the hybridization based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm with a Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) algorithm to solve our problem. The effectiveness of this approach is tested on a set of the dynamic green problems instances, which are adopted in this work from the static GVRP benchmark datasets.