SUSTAINABLE VEHICLE ROUTING FOR SIMULTANEOUS PICKUPANDDELIVERY IN LAST MILE PROBLEM

Abstract

The paper proposes a variant of Green Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with simultaneous pickupand delivery within time windows. The back- bone of the e-commerce industry is thedirect involvement of consumers in product delivery known as last mile delivery. The last mile delivery is the most inefficient, expensive and significant emitter of greenhouse gases inthe road freight transportation. The model here is an extension of classical vehiclerouting problem which minimizes the total cost function comprising of distance cost, fuel cost, driver cost and most important car- bon emission cost to serve a set of customers withinthe time window. It sheds light on trade offs between certain parameters like load, traffic, velocity and eco-friendly vehicle routing via nonlinear programming for- mulation with a set of valid constraints. The optimal solutions can be found out via heuristic approach, geneticalgorithm or tabu search algo- rithm. The main purpose is to show the importance of fuel consumption as compared to distance minimization. In contrary to the classical VRP, this model is difficult to solve to optimal but has the potential of yielding savings in total cost