A Vehicle Routing Problem Solution Considering Alternative Stop Points
Logistics, especially the city logistics delivery, becomes one of the main contributors of energy consumption and environment pollution in the urban transportation system. Reasonable vehicle route planning is viewed as an important solution to lower the energy consumption of the delivery vehicle as well as reduce logistics enterprises’ operation costs. However, in most existing vehicle routing problem (VRP) studies, the road networks were simplified and the client points were connected by unidirectional roads, which is obviously inconsistent with the actual conditions of the road network. A new VRP solution based on a bi-directional road network, which aims to minimize fuel consumption for a gasoline powered delivery vehicle, is proposed in this paper. First, the mathematic VRP model with the minimal-fuel consumption as optimization objective is established. Then, a bi-directional road network for VRP is constructed and an alternative stop point for each delivery client is formulated according to the weight of package and the walking distance of the deliveryman. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated in an actual road network and the results show that the proposed solution for VRP reduces the distance of roundabout and the fuel consumption of the delivery vehicle effectively.