Recently, logistics is not only playing more and more important role in social and economic development, but also caused serious energy consumption and environment pollution problems. Reasonable vehicle route planning is viewed as an important solution to reduce logistics enterprises’ operation costs as well as alleviate the energy and environmental problems. This study aims to propose a solution to time-dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows (TDVRPTW) considering minimising fuel consumption. First, a mathematical TDVRPTW model with the minimum fuel consumption as an objective function is established, in which the three-dimensional bin-packing problem is considered as a sub-problem and the alternative stop point concept is newly proposed to reduce the possible detouring distance and fuel consumption of logistic vehicle. Then, an ant colony algorithm is applied to solve the problem, and the departure time optimisation is introduced to further improve the obtained results. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated with the real road network and traffic data of Beijing. The results show that the method introduced in this study outperforms the existing approaches in reducing fuel consumption as well as route length.

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Vehicle routing problem solution considering minimising fuel consumption

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