Abstract
The amount of pollution emitted by a vehicle depends on its load and speed, among other factors. This paper presents the Pollution-Routing Problem (PRP), an extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with a broader and more comprehensive objective function that accounts not just for the travel distance, but also for the amount of greenhouse emissions, fuel, travel times and their costs. Mathematical models are described for the PRP with or without time windows and computational experiments are performed on realistic instances. The paper sheds light on the tradeoffs between various parameters such as vehicle load, speed and total cost, and offers insight on economies of 'environmental-friendly' vehicle routing. The results suggest that, contrary to the VRP, the PRP is significantly more difficult to solve to optimality but has the potential of yielding savings in total cost.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1232-1250 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Transportation Research Part B: Methodological |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2011 |
Funding
Thanks are due to the reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was partially supported by a Pump-Priming grant from the School of Management at the University of Southampton and by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grant 39682-05 . This support is gratefully acknowledged.
Keywords
- Energy consumption
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Time windows
- Vehicle routing
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Transportation
