Green Logistics has emerged as the new agenda item in supply chain management. The traditional objective of distribution management has been upgraded to minimizing system-wide costs related to economic and environmental issues. Reflecting the environmental sensitivity of vehicle routing problems (VRP), an extensive literature review of Green Vehicle Routing Problems (GVRP) is presented. We provide a classification of GVRP that categorizes GVRP into Green-VRP, Pollution Routing Problem, VRP in Reverse Logistics, and suggest research gaps between its state and richer models describing the complexity in real-world cases. The purpose is to review the most up-to-date state-of-the-art of GVRP, discuss how the traditional VRP variants can interact with GVRP and offer an insight into the next wave of research into GVRP. It is hoped that OR/MS researchers together with logistics practitioners can be inspired and cooperate to contribute to a sustainable industry.

Survey of Green Vehicle Routing Problem: Past and future trends

https://pure.tue.nl/ws/files/3887204/760250.pdf

A review of recent research on green road freight transportation

This study aims to review the literature in green supply chain management (GSCM) published from 1998 to 2017 and presenting insights and directions for future research. The study collects data from Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases and objectively selects 880 papers and conducts metadata analysis. In addtion, 236 papers from ISI Web of Science is analyzed to present the insights along with the classifications of the literatures based on content analyses, which comprises of conceptual development, drivers and barriers, collaboration with supply chain partners, mathematical and other optimization models, and assessment of green supply chain management practices and performance. The study finds that research on drivers or barriers analysis of green supply chain management reveals a declining trend while there is a growing trend of applying mathematical optimization models for enhancing decision making in pursuit of environmental performance. Moreover, the study finds a consistent growth in the evaluation of green supply chain management practices and performance. Though, the concept of green supply chain management started gaining popularity among academicians from the beginning of the 20th century, this study finds a sharp growth of publications on the topic after 2010 until now. This study identifies influential authors, top journals, top contributing countries, top contributing institutions and contribution by disciplines. This study presents a comprehensive but straightforward conceptual model of green supply chain management. The findings and future research directions of the study offers a new avenue for further exploration and contribution to this discipline.

A literature review on green supply chain management: Trends and future challenges

Application of fuzzy VIKOR for evaluation of green supply chain management practices

Analysis of enablers for implementation of sustainable supply chain management - A textile case

This paper introduces an alternative to intra-route recharging of Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) used for freight distribution by exploiting new pertinent technological developments that make mobile battery swapping possible. The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Synchronised Mobile Battery Swapping (EVRPTW-SMBS) is introduced in which route planning is carried out in two interdependent levels: (i) for the ECVs to deliver customers’ demands, and (ii) for the Battery Swapping Vans (BSVs) to swap the depleted battery on an ECV with a fully charged one at a designated time and space. Each BSV route can provide the battery swapping service to multiple ECVs, and each ECV can extend its autonomy by requesting the battery swapping service for as many times as required with no need to divert from its original delivery route. The EVRPTW-SMBS opens up multiple opportunities to facilitate eco-friendly goods distribution using ECVs and brings in extra flexibility and cost savings. At the same time, it is a challenging problem to tackle mainly due to the interdependence problem that stems from the spatio-temporal synchronisation requirement between the vehicles in the two levels (i.e. ECVs and BSVs). To tackle these complications, the paper proposes a methodology for exact evaluation of an EVRPTW-SMBS solution based on a two-stage hybridisation of a dynamic programming and an integer programming algorithm, and places the resulting procedure at the heart of an intensified large neighbourhood search algorithm to solve instances of the EVRPTW-SMBS efficiently. A library of EVRPTW-SMBS test instances is developed and used to demonstrate the added value of the proposed problem variant and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Our results demonstrate the benefits of using BSVs in the design of the delivery routes for ECVs, and indicate that a particular variant of the proposed algorithms which is based on a specific lexicographical decomposition routine can efficiently approximate the optimal solution to the EVRPTW-SMBS.

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The electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronised mobile battery swapping

Transportation industry, as the carrier of goods and passengers, is undeniably one of the fundamental infrastructures, necessary for economic and industrial growth and development. Road transportation, in this amidst, has still kept its popularity, and in spite of air, sea and rail transportation developments, companies rely greatly on road transportation as the most dependable choice yet. At the same time it is one of the hugest consumers of petroleum products, and thus a big contributor to greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions in the air. Being a threatening issue, environmental impacts of different industries as a whole, and transportation pollution as specific, ought not to be neglected anymore and immediate and proper studies as well as actions need to be thought of in dealing with this predicament. “Green Transportation” is a highly interdisciplinary area and researchers and scholars of different realms of knowledge, including automotive engineers, policy makers, management intellectuals, urban planners, chemical engineers, and others, are trying to reduce CO2 emissions from the sector. Them amongst the lagging behind, but pivotal and accommodating role of operation research (OR), with its becoming tool of optimization, has not been fully regarded and needs to be more deeply reviewed. This paper tries to bridge this gap by providing an insight into what OR may contribute to the problem, by reviewing how it has already done it and how it is going to.

/pdf/green-transportation-and-the-role-of-operations-research-2hx2blo4ox.pdf

Green transportation and the role of operations research

Road transportation is a big contributor to the existing CO2 emissions, among other greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air pollutants. The amount of emitted pollutants by a vehicle depends on the amount of fuel consumed and the type of fuel utilised. Moreover, the fuel consumption level is dependent on distance, load, speed, road gradient, driving pattern and many more factors. This paper extends vehicle routing problem (VRP) literature by developing a new variant as a green routing problem (GRP) which deals with optimising CO2 emissions and costs from a bi-fuel vehicle fleet, which runs on both the main fuel and the cleaner alternative fuel. The modelling approach deals with not only the fuel consumption level, but also with the optimised utilisation of the alternative fuel of the vehicle. To analyse environmental and economic performance of the GRP, two extensions as P-GRP and CB-GRP were developed and implemented in an Iranian case study, with a bi-fuel (gasoline/CNG) fleet. Results of the case study and computational experiments suggest a possible reduction in CO2 emissions by up to 27.38% and in costs by up to 18.76%, when compared with CVRP with a simple distance minimisation objective, using the conventional gasoline as the fuel.

A green routing problem: optimising CO 2 emissions and costs from a bi-fuel vehicle fleet

Entrepreneurship brings about economic innovation and job formation, and its improvement can well account for the unemployment crisis. However, many barriers either stop entrepreneurs from entering the market, or lead their business to failure after entering. These barriers have been sparsely and case dependently reported in the literature, but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have been yet designated to investigate the general barriers to entrepreneurship. This paper tries to bridge this gap by reviewing the most relevant and available literature to elicit the major general barriers to entrepreneurship. Eleven general barriers to entrepreneurship are identified and supported by the related literature. Since these barriers are not independent and unconnected, but interrelated and interactive, understanding the interactions among them can help decision makers in determining appropriate overcoming measures. In order to model these interactions this paper utilizes interpretive structural modeling (ISM) which has shown to be an efficient approach for analyzing systematic interactions among barriers. We distinct barriers into two groups of inside and outside barriers and with the support of the ISM-based model, we show that inside barriers are dependent on outside barriers. Corrupted and unsupportive business environment then, shows to be the major driving barrier to entrepreneurship.

/pdf/understanding-the-interactions-among-the-barriers-to-1m582b08er.pdf

Understanding the Interactions among the Barriers to Entrepreneurship Using Interpretive Structural Modeling

This paper introduces the Steiner Pollution-Routing Problem (SPRP) as a realistic variant of the PRP that can take into account the real operating conditions of urban freight distribution. The SPRP is a multi-objective, time and load dependent, fleet size and mix PRP, with time windows, flexible departure times, and multi-trips on congested urban road networks, that aims at minimising three objective functions pertaining to (i) vehicle hiring cost, (ii) total amount of fuel consumed, and (iii) total makespan (duration) of the routes. The paper focuses on a key complication arising from emissions minimisation in a time and load dependent setting, corresponding to the identification of the full set of the eligible road-paths between consecutive truck visits a priori, and to tackle the issue proposes new combinatorial results leading to the development of an exact Path Elimination Procedure (PEP). A PEP-based Mixed Integer Programming model is further developed for the SPRP and embedded within an efficient mathematical programming technique to generate the full set of the non-dominated points on the Pareto frontier of the SPRP. The proposed model considers truck instantaneous Acceleration/Deceleration (A/D) rates in the fuel consumption estimation, and to address the possible lack of such data at the planning stage, a new model for the construction of reliable synthetic spatiotemporal driving cycles from available macroscopic traffic speed data is introduced. Several analyses are conducted to: (i) demonstrate the added value of the proposed approach, (ii) exhibit the trade-off between the business and environmental objectives on the Pareto front of the SPRP, (iii) show the benefits of using multiple trips, and (iv) verify the reliability of the proposed model for the generation of driving cycles. A real road network based on the Chicago's arterial streets is also used for further experimentation with the proposed PEP algorithm.

/pdf/the-multi-objective-steiner-pollution-routing-problem-on-i03qamhd9c.pdf

Ramin Raeesi

Papers

The electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronised mobile battery swapping

Green transportation and the role of operations research

A green routing problem: optimising CO 2 emissions and costs from a bi-fuel vehicle fleet

Understanding the Interactions among the Barriers to Entrepreneurship Using Interpretive Structural Modeling

The multi-objective Steiner pollution-routing problem on congested urban road networks