Development of a fuel consumption optimization model for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Yiyong Xiao, Qiuhong Zhao*, Ikou Kaku, Yuchun Xu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Fuel consumption accounts for a large and increasing part of transportation costs. In this paper, the Fuel Consumption Rate (FCR), a factor considered as a load dependant function, is added to the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to extend traditional studies on CVRP with the objective of minimizing fuel consumption. We present a mathematical optimization model to formally characterize the FCR considered CVRP (FCVRP) as well as a string based version for calculation. A simulated annealing algorithm with a hybrid exchange rule is developed to solve FCVRP and shows good performance on both the traditional CVRP and the FCVRP in substantial computation experiments. The results of the experiments show that the FCVRP model can reduce fuel consumption by 5% on average compared to the CVRP model. Factors causing the variation in fuel consumption are also identified and discussed in this study.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1419-1431
Number of pages13
JournalComputers and Operations Research
Volume39
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2012

Keywords

  • Capacitated VRP (CVRP)
  • FCR considered CVRP (FCVRP)
  • Fuel Consumption Rate (FCR)
  • String-model-based Simulated Annealing (SMSA) algorithm

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