Vehicle routing problem with fuel consumption and carbon emission

In this paper, we study a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with the consideration of fuel consumption and carbon emission. To be specific, we incorporate fuel cost, carbon emission cost, and vehicle usage cost into the traditional VRP problem and establish a low-carbon routing problem model. Based on the route splitting method, we develop an improved tabu search algorithm named RS-TS for solving the model. In the RS-TS algorithm, we introduce a novel route encoding and decoding algorithm named WSS, in which three neighborhood search methods are applied. By numerical studies we show that the RS-TS algorithm is effective with a satisfactory solution and can better reveal the relationships among distance, fuel consumption, travel time, and other parameters. Moreover, we also show that the route and vehicle arrangements based on fuel consumption and carbon emission are both economic and environmentally friendly. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.