Optimising green vehicle routing problem-a real case study

The optimisation of distribution activities in the logistics scheme of various companies, long time based on economic objectives, is widening today to integrate environmental concerns. This paper addresses the fuel consumption minimisation problem for one variant of the green VRP which is the VRP with fuel consumption rate (FCVRP) and considers load and distance as two main factors affecting fuel consumption. The problem is classified as NP-hard, hence, we propose to solve it by an iterated local search meta-heuristic (ILSFC-SP) starting with a heuristic approach that is based on mathematical programming and generates solutions by CPLEX. In order to test its performance, ILSFC-SP was first applied on benchmark instances to minimise fuel consumption as well as travelled distance and compared with the literature where it proved its efficacy, then, it was applied to a real-world application in Tunisia where it suggested operational solutions reducing considerably the fuel costs. [Submitted: 28 June 2019; Accepted: 17 April 2022]