Development of a fuel consumption optimization model for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Fuel consumption accounts for a large and increasing part of transportation costs. In this paper, the Fuel Consumption Rate (FCR), a factor considered as a load dependant function, is added to the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to extend traditional studies on CVRP with the objective of minimizing fuel consumption. We present a mathematical optimization model to formally characterize the FCR considered CVRP (FCVRP) as well as a string based version for calculation. A simulated annealing algorithm with a hybrid exchange rule is developed to solve FCVRP and shows good performance on both the traditional CVRP and the FCVRP in substantial computation experiments. The results of the experiments show that the FCVRP model can reduce fuel consumption by 5% on average compared to the CVRP model. Factors causing the variation in fuel consumption are also identified and discussed in this study. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.