Green Vehicle Routing Problem: The Tradeoff between Travel Distance and Carbon Emissions

Abstract

Recently, the green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) starts to attract the attention of researchers due to the awareness of the environmental impact of transportation. The GRVP is an extension of the classical VRP by taking minimization of travel distance as well as carbon emissions as the objectives. In this paper, we solved the GVRP by a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm to find the set of Pareto optimal solutions. We found that the tradeoff between travel distance and carbon emissions is small with a load-distance emission model and a parameter setting in the literature. The tradeoff becomes significant only when the emissions of an empty vehicle and of a full-load vehicle differ a lot. Whether the GVRP should be treated as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP) or not needs more investigation in the future.