Solving Transport Problems

5An Overview of the Recent Solution Approaches in the Green Vehicle Routing Problem

The Green Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is a branch of green logistics where the primary concern is the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs), next to other externalities caused by the intensive use of roads and other modes of transportation. From an operations research perspective, several exact and approximate methods were developed for different extensions of the GVRP since 2007. This chapter presents a brief review of the progress of the literature on GVRP as well as an up-to-date summary of the most frequently used solution approaches applied for the GVRP and its different variants from 2014.

5.1. Introduction

The Green Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is an extension of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The VRP was introduced by Dantzig and Ramser (1959) as the “Truck dispatching problem”. It aims to find an optimal routing of a set of vehicles located at a central depot which aim to satisfy the demands of a set of dispersed customers. The primary objective of the first formulations of the VRP is the minimization of economic costs through the total traveled distance or the total time spent in the tour. Many variants of the VRP were conducted since its introduction, such as time window constraints, the congested period when defining time periods, split deliveries, simultaneous pickup and delivery, and so on. Lin et al. (2014) surveyed the numerous variants of the VRP that appeared ...