A block recombination approach to solve green vehicle routing problem

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most important problem with many real world application in transportation and logistics area. Presently carbon dioxide emission is one of the major concerns for the researchers. Green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) is the extension of the vehicle routing problem. In GVRP we consider the minimum distance travelled by each vehicle from depot to distribution center as well as the total emitted carbon dioxide by the vehicle. In this paper, we consider the distance based approach to calculate the carbon dioxide emission. In addition, the truck load is considered as a factor for the carbon dioxide emission. We generate the different cluster for each city visited by different trucks and apply block recombination approach to solve the GVRP benchmark problem where each cluster represents as a block. To avoid the bias, we compare the experimental results with other well know evolutionary algorithms. Computational results show that the proposed methodology is very competitive and has the promising future. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.