A heuristic approach for green vehicle routing

Abstract

This paper addresses a green capacitated vehicle routing problem that accounts for transportation emissions. A Dynamic Programming approach has been used to formulate the problem. Although small-sized problems can be solved by Dynamic Programming, this approach is infeasible for larger problems due to the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, we propose a Dynamic Programming based solution approach that involves the ideas of restriction, simulation and online control of parameters to solve large-sized problems. The added values of the proposed decision support tool have been shown on a small-sized base case and relatively larger problems. Performance comparisons of the proposed heuristic against other existing Dynamic Programming based solution approaches reveal its effectiveness, as in most of the instance-setting pairs, the proposed heuristic outperforms the existing ones. Accordingly, the proposed heuristic can be used as an alternative decision support tool to tackle real routing problems confronted in sustainable logistics management.