Green Vehicle Routing Problem with Safety and Social Concerns

Over the two last decades, distribution companies have been aware of the importance of paying simultaneous attention to all economical, environmental, social, and safety aspects of a distribution system for success in the global market. The economic issue is often used in caseof the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) literature, while the environmental, the safety and the social concerns constitute less proportion ofstudies. The Green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) is one of the recent variants of the VRP, dealing with environmental aspects ofdistribution systems. In this paper, two developed mixed integer programming models are presented for the GVRP with social and safetyconcerns. Moreover, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is developed to deal efficiently with the large-sized problem . Different numerical analyseshave been performed to validate the presented algorithm in comparison to exact solutions and to investigate the influence of several keyfactors such as the effect of increasing the cost of safety aspect on route balancing and customer s waiting time. The results confirm that theproposed algorithm performs well and has more social and safety benefits, including more balanced tours and fewer customers waitingtime than those of the classic GVRP

Keywords:

Logistics , Green vehicle routing problem , Route balancing , Mixed integer linear programming , Genetic algorithm