A recent review of solution approaches for green vehicle routing problem and its variants

Abstract

The green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) has been a prominent topic in the literature on logistics and transportation, leading to extensive research and previous review studies covering various aspects. Operations research has seen the development of various exact and approximation approaches for different extensions of the GVRP. This paper presents an up-to-date and thorough review of GVRP literature spanning from 2016 to 2023, encompassing 458 papers. significant contribution lies in the updated solution approaches and algorithms applied to both single-objective and multi-objective GVRP. Notably, 92.58 % of the papers introduced a mathematical model for GVRP, with many researchers adopting mixed integer linear programming as the preferred modeling approach. The findings indicate that both metaheuristics and hybrid are the most employed solution approaches for addressing single-objective GVRP. Among hybrid approaches, the combination of metaheuristics-metaheuristics is particularly favored by GVRP researchers. Furthermore, large neighborhood search (LNS) and its variants (especially adaptive large neighborhood search) emerges as the most widely adopted algorithm in single-objective GVRP. These algorithms are proposed within both metaheuristic and hybrid approaches, where A-/LNS is often combined with other algorithms. Conversely, metaheuristics are predominant in addressing multi-objective GVRP, with NSGA-II being the most frequently proposed algorithm. Researchers frequently utilize GAMS and CPLEX as optimization modeling software and solvers. Furthermore, MATLAB is a commonly employed programming language for implementing proposed algorithms.

Keywords

• Green vehicle routing problem
• Vehicle routing problem
• Single-objective optimization
• Multi-objective optimization
• Solution approach
• Literature review