A sustainable vehicle routing problem with alternative road and speed options

Abstract

Economic, environmental and social considerations are three main pillar of sustainability and maintaining the balance between them is the key issue to acchieve sustainability. In addition, the regulations in different countries concerning driver working hours and CO2 emissions create new challenges for the logistics companies in their operations. Motivated by the emerging environmental and social considerations in logistics companies, we propose a novel multi objective mixed integer linear programming model for vehicle routing problem with financial, environmental and social objectives, considering different speed choices and alternative links with different characteristics between nodes. The results of the developed models with varying system parameters are discussed through detailed numerical experiments and significant managerial insights are obtained. It is observed that there is a significant trade-off between social, environmental and financial objectives and better balanced results can be obtained by considering these objectives simultaneously. The routes used by the vehicles are also significantly affected by the characteristics of the system parameters.