A Model of Vehicle Routing Problem Minimizing Energy Consumption in Urban Environment

The energy consumption of vehicles in urban distribution is worthy of attention for both low-carbon logistics and deduction of distribution cost. The classical models of logistics distribution generally focused on minimizing the distance covered by vehicles and paid little attention to the properties of urban distribution. This paper presents a model of urban vehicle routing problem with the object function minimizing the energy consumption of vehicles (VRPMEC) based on the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). By analyzing properties of urban distribution, we found that VRPMEC is more difficultly solved than CVRP by comparing their solution space and the complexity of implementing 2-opt, or-opt, exchange and swap in their solutions. However, the energy consumption of vehicles and distance covered by vehicles are significantly correlated in the same solution. A multi-objective optimization model for VRPMEC and its solving strategy were proposed. The experiment on the instances extended based on benchmark CVRP instances has carried out and the results have indicated that the proposed strategy is effective and efficient.