Solution of the Capacity-Constrained Vehicle Routing Problem Considering Carbon Footprint Within the Scope of Sustainable Logistics with Genetic Algorithm

Bedrettin Türker Palamutçuoğlu, Selin Çavuşoğlu, Ahmet Yavuz Çamlı, Florina Oana Virlanuta (), Silviu Bacalum, Deniz Züngün and Florentina Moisescu
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Bedrettin Türker Palamutçuoğlu: Department of Management and Organization, Kula Vocational School, Manisa Celal Bayar University, Manisa 45140, Turkey
Selin Çavuşoğlu: Department of Management and Organization, Kula Vocational School, Manisa Celal Bayar University, Manisa 45140, Turkey
Ahmet Yavuz Çamlı: Department of Management and Organization, Kula Vocational School, Manisa Celal Bayar University, Manisa 45140, Turkey
Florina Oana Virlanuta: Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, 800008 Galaţi, Romania
Silviu Bacalum: Department of Sciences, Cross-Border Faculty, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, 800201 Galaţi, Romania
Deniz Züngün: Department of International Trade and Logistics, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University, İstanbul 35000, Turkey
Florentina Moisescu: Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, 800008 Galaţi, Romania

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 2, 1-30

Abstract: One of the important problems of sustainable logistics is routing vehicles in a sustainable manner, the green vehicle routing problem, or vehicle routing problems which aim to reduce CO 2 emissions. In the literature research, it was seen that these problems were solved with heuristic, metaheuristic, or hyper-heuristic methods and hybrid approaches since they are in the NP-hard class. This work presents a parallel multi-process genetic algorithm that incorporates problem-specific genetic operators to minimize CO 2 emissions in the capacity-constrained vehicle routing problem. Unlike previous research, the algorithm combines parallel computing with tailored genetic operators in order to enhance the diversity of solutions and speed up convergence. Genetic algorithm models were developed to minimize total distance, CO 2 emissions, and both objectives simultaneously. Two genetic algorithm models were developed to minimize total distance and CO 2 emissions. Experimental results using the reference CVRP examples such as A-n32-k5 and B-n44-k7 show that the proposed approach reduces CO 2 emissions by 1.2% more than hybrid artificial bee colony optimization, 1.3% more than ant colony optimization, and 4% more than the traditional genetic algorithm. Experimental results using benchmark CVRP instances demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms hybrid artificial bee colony optimization, ant colony optimization, and traditional genetic algorithms for most of the test cases. This is done by exploiting multi-core processors, and the parallel architecture has improved computational efficiency; the modules compare and update solutions against the global optimum. Results obtained show that prioritizing CO 2 emissions as the only objective yields better results compared to multi-objective models. This study makes two significant contributions to the literature: (1) it introduces a novel parallel genetic algorithm framework optimized for CO 2 emission reduction, and (2) it provides empirical evidence underscoring the advantages of emission-focused optimization in CVRP.

Keywords: carbon footprint; green vehicle routing; sustainable vehicle routing; genetic algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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