A COMPARISON OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF HARD TIME WINDOWS AND SEMI SOFT TIME WINDOWS USING EXACT ROUTING SOLUTION

Abstract

Various treatments of the time windows in different logistics schemes produce different economic and environmental results. Besides their economic perspective, this paper compares the environment-related effects of the Hard Time Windows (HTW) and the Semi Soft Time Windows (SSTW). Along with using exact solution techniques for both the HTW and SSTW scenarios in the Vehicle Routing and scheduling Problem, a detailed-link-based environmental analysis is performed on a practical test instance using real road network. The SSTW case was found not only economically viable but environmentally more sustainable as compared to the HTW case with lower emission intensities.