Research on a Vehicle Routing Schedule to Reduce Fuel Consumption

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most challenging combinatorial optimization task. This problem consists in designing the optimal set of routes for fleet of vehicles in order to serve a given set of customers. Almost all the research papers of VRPs focus on minimizing the sum of travel distance (travel time). However, vehicle managers are also interested in the vehicle routing schedules which minimize fuel consumption caused by two factors. First, reducing fuel consumption means reducing the service cost. Second, reducing fuel consumption means reducing its impact on our environment (green-house effect), our health (air pollutants), and our economy (increased fuel prices). This paper provides a new vehicle routing problem based on reducing fuel consumption. That is, the optimization objective of the vehicle routing problem is to minimize the fuel consumption. The paper also gives the corresponding vehicle routing problem, the optimization objective of which is to minimize the travel distance. Through a numerical example, the two problems are compared. The result shows that a different vehicle routing schedule is probable found if the optimization objective is to minimize fuel consumption other than to minimize travel distance.