Green Vehicle Routing Problems in the New Mobility Era

The rapid advances in wireless communication and ubiquitous mobile is changing the way people and goods move in the new mobility era. The world’s population is increasingly city-based. Urban mobility becomes one of the toughest challenges that cities face. On the one hand, the fast growing e-commerce industry has resulted in the increasing volume of goods transportation, as well as the increasing demand for freight transportation service in terms of delivery time and reliability by consumers. On the other hand, the growing environmental concerns (e.g., fuel consumption, land use, Greenhouse Gas emissions) are taking center stage. These factors have put enormous pressure on the freight carriers to meet this last-mile challenge in transportation cost, delivery time and reliability. A new generation of efficient, timely, reliable, green transportation system becomes the answer of these various problems. This dissertation aims at building a novel system that simultaneously achieves a maximization of carrier’s net profit and significantly diminishes the negative effects of freight transportation on the environment. It is of critical importance for the logistics industry to fully exploit the potential to be more efficient, flexible and sustainable. To obtain this objective, one of the most important technical cores needs to be considered is the eco-routing tool that minimizes the total transportation system cost due to travel time, fuel consumption as well as vehicular emission under different frameworks of various vehicle routing problems. Specifically, this research concentrates on three vehicle routing problems in the context of the new mobility era, namely Green Same Day Package Delivery Service with Real-time Demand, Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Flexible Recharging and An Ad Hoc Peer-to-Peer Transshipment and Same Day Delivery Problem. These research efforts aim to tackle the following major challenges in freight industry: pre-scheduled and single shipment oriented delivery, dangerous effects on environment caused by conventional vehicle emissions, inefficient service and lack of collaboration among logistics carriers respectively. This proposed research makes significant scientific contributions to the vehicle routing literature in model formulation and algorithm design in the following aspects: (1) consideration of real-time information in routing, (2) eco-routing by minimizing other harmful pollutants such as particulate matter (PM), (3) fast online algorithms on a mobile platform (e.g., smartphone) applicable to large scale urban delivery, (4) alternative delivery mode of electric vehicles allows flexible recharging (full or partial) en-route and (5) incorporation of the ad-hoc pick-up and delivery requests in transshipment problem. The products of this research are (1) an eco-routing tool that enables real-time on-the-go cargo consolidation service, (2) an electric vehicle routing tool that helps the penetration of EVs in freight industry, and (3) an ad hoc platform that enables collaboration among couriers such that resources are better utilized. These can be applied to future urban goods delivery e-markets, which will bring customers flexible, timely and economical logistics service while maximizing couriers’ net gain through shared resources enabled by wireless communication and mobile computing. At the same time, the adverse effects of freight transportation on the environment will also be reduced, which makes the urban delivery service system more sustainable.