With the growing environmental concerns and the rising number of electric vehicles, researchers and companies are paying more and more attention to green logistics. This paper studies the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with time-dependent speeds and soft time windows. The purpose is to minimize the total distance travelled, while penalizing early or late arrivals at the customers’ locations. For this purpose, we formulated the Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and developed a General Variable Neighborhood Search (GVNS) metaheuristic, an efficient way to tackle this problem. To prove the efficiency of our approach, we tested the GVNS against the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) algorithm and our MILP model, using a set of available benchmark instances. After an extensive experimental evaluation, we concluded that GVNS can find better quality solutions than other methods considered in this research or the same quality solution in less time.

As a result of the rapidly increasing distribution network, the toxic gases emitted by the vehicles to the environment have also increased, thus posing a threat to health. This study deals with the problem of determining green vehicle routes aiming to minimize CO2 emissions to meet customers' demand in a supermarket chain that distributes fresh and dried products. A new method based on clustering algorithms and Hopfield Neural Network is proposed to solve the problem. We first divide the large-size green vehicle routing problem into clusters using the K-Means and K-Medoids algorithms, and then the routing problem for each cluster is found using the Hopfield Neural Network, which minimizes CO2 emissions. A real-life example is carried out to illustrate the performance and applicability of the proposed method. The research concludes that the proposed approach produces very encroaching results.

This article discusses the ecological vehicle routing problem with a stop at a refueling station titled Green-Vehicle Routing Problem. In this problem, the refueling stations and the limit of fuel tank capacity are considered for the construction of a tour. We propose a variable neighborhood search to solve the problem. We tested and compared the performance of our algorithm intensively on datasets existing in the literature.

This paper introduces a new bi-objective vehicle routing problem that integrates the Open Location Routing Problem (OLRP), recently presented in the literature, coupled with the growing need for fuel consumption minimization, named Green OLRP (G-OLRP). Open routing problems (ORP) are known to be NP-hard problems, in which vehicles start from the set of existing depots and are not required to return to the starting depot after completing their service. The OLRP is a strategic-level problem involving the selection of one or many depots from a set of candidate locations and the planning of delivery radial routes from the selected depots to a set of customers. The concept of radial paths allows us to use a set of constraints focused on maintaining the radiality condition of the paths, which significantly simplifies the set of constraints associated with the connectivity and capacity requirements and provides a suitable alternative when compared with the elimination problem of sub-tours traditionally addressed in the literature. The emphasis in the paper will be placed on modeling rather than solution methods. The model proposed is formulated as a bi-objective problem, considering the minimization of operational costs and the minimization of environmental effects, and it is solved by using the epsilon constraint technique. The results illustrate that the proposed model is able to generate a set of trade-off solutions leading to interesting conclusions about the relationship between operational costs and environmental impact.