A practical solution approach for the green vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Green vehicle routing (GVRP) is an active research area that is concerned with the development and analysis of distribution activities with eco-friendly vehicles. We propose a practical solution approach for the GVRP that uses a mixed-integer linear formulation and a reduction procedure. The newly formulation offers two significant advantages: compactness and flexibility. We provide empirical evidence that the formulation and the reduction procedure enable to derive optimal solutions for medium-sized instances using a general-purpose solver. We show that the proposed exact approach consistently outperforms a state-of-the-art branch-and-cut algorithm and constitutes an appealing and practical alternative for optimally solving GVRPs.