A Two-Stage Hybrid Metaheuristic for a Low-Carbon Vehicle Routing Problem in Hazardous Chemicals Road Transportation

Abstract

Low-carbon economy advances the sustainable development of the transportation of hazardous chemicals. This paper focuses on the multi-trip heterogeneous vehicle routing problem that includes the prioritization of customers and transportation of incompatible cargoes (MTHVRP-PCIC) in which some customers are prioritized for delivery by heterogeneous vehicles and more than one type of cargo is transported. This is an issue because some cargoes are incompatible with each other and therefore cannot be loaded into the same vehicle. MFHVRP-PCIC aims to find a set of routes resulting in minimal costs including fixed cost, travel cost and carbon emission cost. This problem occurs in real-life applications in the hazardous chemicals road transportation industry. This paper contributes to addressing the MTHVRP-PCIC from a problem definition, model, and methodological point of view. We establish a mathematical formulation for this problem. A two-stage hybrid metaheuristic approach (TSHM) is also devised to solve this problem. First, an improved greedy randomized adaptive search procedure is designed to generate initial feasible solutions. Then, a hybrid genetic algorithm including local search strategies, split-feasibility procedure, and simulated annealing is designed to solve this problem. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to solve a real case of hazardous chemical delivery and a benchmark dataset, and the resulting solutions indicate the advantage of our algorithm compared with those solutions obtained from managerial experience and classical algorithms.

Keywords

• hazardous chemicals road transportation
• low carbon
• heterogeneous vehicle routing problem
• prioritized customers
• incompatible cargoes
• two-stage hybrid metaheuristic