VEHICLE ROUTING TO MINIMIZE MIXED-FLEET FUEL CONSUMPTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

摘要

Efficient vehicle routing is critical to the operational profitability and customer satisfaction of vehicle fleet-related businesses, especially in light of increasing, and highly volatile, fuel prices. Growing pressures to reduce negative environmental impacts have suggested that a second metric (vehicle emissions) should also be considered in vehicle routing. Currently, the majority of existing tools use distance as a surrogate for cost. When considering a mixed fleet of multiple vehicle types, with individual vehicles within a fleet type also varying by age and vehicle health, this surrogate becomes significantly less accurate. Furthermore, using distance as a surrogate fails to capture the variations between city and highway driving, which are particularly striking for hybrid vehicles. We thus propose a new approach to the vehicle routing problem, specifically targeting applications with mixed fleets including clean-vehicle technologies, in recognition of the limitations of the existing approaches.