Lancaster University Management School

Working Paper
2007/027

The relationship between vehicle routing and scheduling and

green logistics - a literature survey

Abdelkader Sbihi and Richard William Eglese

The Department of Management Science

Lancaster University Management School
Lancaster LA1 4YX
UK

© Abdelkader Sbihi and Richard William Eglese

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed
two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission,
provided that full acknowledgement is given.

The LUMS Working Papers series can be accessed at http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/publications/

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 The Relationship between Vehicle Routing
& Scheduling and Green Logistics -
A Literature Survey

A. Sbihi∗ R.W. Eglese∗

Abstract.
The basic Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem (VRSP) is described followed
by an outline of solution approaches. Different variations of the basic VRSP are
examined that involve the consideration of additional constraints or other changes
in the structure of the appropriate model. An introduction is provided to Green Lo-
gistics issues that are relevant to vehicle routing and scheduling including discussion
of the environmental objectives that should be considered. Particular consideration
is given to VRSP models that relate to environmental issues including the time-
dependent VRSP, the transportation of hazardous materials and dynamic VRSP
models. Finally some conclusions are drawn about further research needs in this
area and the relation to road pricing.
Keywords: vehicle routing, scheduling, emission, congestion, environment, green
logistics

1 Introduction
The Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem (VRSP) concerns the determi-
nation of routes and schedules for a fleet of vehicles to satisfy the demands of
a set of customers. The basic Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP)
can be described in the following way. We are given a set of homogeneous
vehicles each of capacity Q, located at a central depot and a set of customers
with known locations and demands to be satisfied by deliveries from the cen-
tral depot. Each vehicle route must start and end at the central depot and the
total customer demand satisfied by deliveries on each route must not exceed
the vehicle capacity, Q. The objective is to determine a set of routes for the
vehicles that will minimize the total cost. The total cost is usually propor-
tional to the total distance traveled if the number of vehicles is fixed and may
∗
Department of Management Science, Lancaster University Management School, LA1
4YX, UK

1
also include an additional term proportional to the number of vehicles used if
the number of routes may vary.

The vehicle routing problem scheme

The CVRP and many of its variants have been well studied in the literature
since its introduction by Danzig and Ramser in 1959 [17]. Its exact solution
is difficult to determine for large-scale problems as it is a member of the class
of NP-Hard problems, where no algorithms have yet been devised where the
time to find a guaranteed optimal solution that is proportional to the size of
the problem (in this case, the number of customers). Specialised algorithms
are able to consistently find optimal solutions for cases with up to about 50
customers; larger problems have been solved to optimality in some cases, but
often at the expense of considerable computing time.
In practice, other variations and additional constraints that must be taken
into consideration usually make the vehicle routing problem even more diffi-
cult to solve to optimality. So many solution procedures are based on heuristic
algorithms that are designed to provide good feasible solutions within an ac-
ceptable computing time, but without a guarantee of optimality.
There are several books and survey articles that have been written that
summarise different approaches and provide references to the large number
of journal articles that have been written on this topic, for example Golden
and Assad (1988) [34] and Toth and Vigo (2001) [67]. There are many other
research works about the classical CVRP; we may cite some exact methods

2
for this problem, for example Laporte and Nobert (1987) [44] or Agarwal et
al., (1989) [2] have proposed optimal approaches to solve the CVRP. Others
have proposed approximate methods and heuristics due to the complexity of
the problem and to try to solve it in a reasonable computing time: we cite,
for example, Laporte and Semet (2002) [45] and Cordeau and Laporte (2004)
[14], and Cordeau et al., (2005) [15] or Gendreau et al., (2002) [32]. Most of
these approaches are based on local search techniques.
Most papers assume that the costs and times of traveling between the depot
and the customers and between customers are known and fixed. They are
either given or calculated using a shortest path algorithm on the graph or
network representing the locations. In practice, the times and shortest paths
may vary, particularly by time of day and this feature will be discussed more
fully in Section 3.
The following section outlines other variations on the basic CVRP which
are important in practical distribution problems.

1.1 Distance or time constraints for each route

In some formulations, a constraint on the maximum distance that can be
traveled by any vehicle before it completes its route is imposed. In other
cases, the constraint concerns the maximum time taken for each route which
may relate to a legal constraint on the working time of the driver. There may
be a distinction between a constraint on the driving time that only includes
time when the vehicle is traveling and a constraint on the total time that also
includes time to load the vehicle and to service each customer on the route.
The reader may refer to some articles (see Desrochers et al., (1988) [20]). We
also cite the work developed in Laporte et al., (2005) [43].

1.2 Time Window constraints

These constraints restrict the times at which a customer is available to receive a
delivery. We call this typical problem the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time
Window (VRPTW). These time window constraints are usually expressed in
terms of a time interval or intervals within which service must begin for each
customer. If a vehicle arrives at a customer before the start of a time window,
then it must normally wait until the start of the time window before service can
commence. Other formulations may treat the time windows as soft constraints
where early or late service may be allowed but at the expense of a penalty in the
objective function. Some exact and approximate methods have been tailored
especially to solve the VRPTW. One example is an optimization algorithm

3
developed for the VRPTW and attributed to Kolen et al., (1987) [41]. Other
more recent papers include, for example, Kallehauge et al., (2006) [38] who
have developed an exact algorithm. Approximate and heuristic methods have
also been built, for example, Potvin and Rousseau (1993) [60], Braysy (2002)
[9] or Lau et al., (2003) [46].

1.3 CVRP with Backhauls

In this variation, there are two subsets of customers: the first subset requires
deliveries from the depot and the second subset requires goods to be picked
up to be delivered to the depot. Normally all deliveries on each route must be
completed before any pick-ups. The total deliveries and the total pick-ups on
each route must separately be less than the capacity of each vehicle, Q. The
reader may refer to Goetschalckx and Jacobs-Blecha (1993) [33] and Casco et
al., (1988) [11].

1.4 CVRP with Pick-up and Delivery

This situation concerns a set of customer orders where a single commodity
is to be picked up from one location and delivered to a second location. The
vehicle routes, starting and finishing at a central depot, must be constructed so
that the route visits the pick-up location for an order before the corresponding
delivery location and the load on each vehicle never exceeds the capacity, Q.
We recall here some research addressed to this type of VRSP, for example,
Desaulniers et al., (2001) [21] and Derigs and Metz (1992) [19]. More can be
found in Toth and Vigo (2001) [67].

1.5 CVRP with non-homogeneous vehicle fleet

In practice, many vehicle routing problems are addressed by a non-homogeneous
vehicle fleet where vehicles of different capacities may be used. The vehicles
may also have differences in other operating characteristics such as the average
speed of travel or the service time at a customer (e.g. due to different goods
handling equipment).

1.6 Open VRSP

The term “Open” is applied to problems where each vehicle is not required to
return to the central depot after visiting the final customer, i.e. the vehicle
routes are open paths instead of closed circuits. This formulation may be

4
appropriate for a situation where vehicles are hired from a third party and the
cost of the hire is based on the distance traveled while the vehicles are loaded.
For more details, one may refer to Brandaõ (2004) [8] and Fu et al., (2005)
[29]. An exact method for the Open VRSP is to be found in Letchford et al.,
(2006) [48].
One variant of the Open VRSP includes the constraint that each route
terminates at one of the driver nodes which are specified beforehand. Driver
nodes practically correspond to parking lots or homes of drivers. The presence
of such fixed driver nodes suits especially those situations in which deliveries
to customers are outsourced to a shipping company, or drivers use the same
vehicles to commute between home and depot.

1.7 Period VRSP

This problem can be defined as the problem of finding routes for all days of
a given T-day period to minimize total costs. These types of problems are
also called allocation/routing problems. The allocation part consists of the
assignment of customers to days of the period, while the routing part governs
for the daily planning. Some articles dealing with this variant of the VRSP
are available in the literature, for example, Cordeau et al., (1997) [16] and
Mourgaya and Vanderbeck (2006) [56].

1.8 Other variations

Many other variations of the basic CVRP have been studied that may include
some of the features already described. These include multi-depot models
where a set of depots replaces the single central depot. If the capacity of
the available fleet of vehicles cannot service the required demand, then the
objective may be focused on satisfying as many customers as possible using
the available fleet. There may also be considerations due to different types
of commodities that imply additional constraints. For example, in delivering
groceries with vehicles where only the front section of the trailer is refrigerated,
frozen goods must be loaded first into the trailer and other non-frozen goods
loaded behind. This may lead to a constraint of delivering all non-frozen goods,
before frozen goods can be unloaded. Distribution managers may also need
to construct routes where a single vehicle is away from the central depot over
more than one day and provision must be made for a suitable location for
the vehicle to be parked over night while the driver rests before continuing
the route the following day. We cite here some of the articles dealing with
other variants of the VRSP, for example, Anily and Federgruen (1990) [1] and

5
Baldacciet al., (2006) [5]. For the case of shipping, we cite Barnes-Schuster
and Bassok (1997) [4].

1.9 Arc Routing Problems

These vehicle routing problems are significantly different to all the VRSPs
described so far. These have all been Node Routing Problems because the
customer demands are all located at points or at the nodes of an underlying
graph or network. In Arc Routing Problems, the demands are associated with
the links between the nodes, called edges (in the undirected case) or arcs (in
the directed case). These represent roads or carriageways in the underlying
road network. Such problems arise naturally in several applications such as
garbage collection, mail delivery, snow clearing, meter reading, school bus
routing, police patrols, and winter gritting. In these cases, a service must
be carried out which involves the vehicle traveling the length of road section
performing the required service. This is often done at a different speed from
when a vehicle is simply traveling along one of the roads without servicing it,
which is often referred to as “deadheading”. These problems may also have
similar variations to those described for Node Routing Problems such as the
existence of time window constraints for the service.
A comprehensive survey of Arc Routing Problems is provided in the book
edited by Dror (2000) [23].

1.10 Stochastic VRSP

The customer demand in many cases is known before the routes need to be
planned because orders have been received at the central depot. However
in some situations, the size of demand from a customer may be unknown
until the vehicle arrives at the customer. This is an example of a stochastic
vehicle routing problem where routes must be planned based on the probability
distribution of the demand at any customer. In such problems, there needs
to be a strategy defined that explains what happens when a vehicle runs out
of the commodity it is carrying before it has completed all its deliveries, for
example returning to the depot by the shortest route in order to reload (for
more details see Stewart and Golden (1983) [66], Dror et al., (1993) [24] and
Yang et al., (2000) [68]).
The stochastic nature of these problems may take many forms. As well
as the level of demand, the timing and location of demand may vary. The
availability of resources may vary as well due to service times, dock times and

6
operations in other zones, regions or areas of operation. More details can be
found in Secomandi (2001) [64] and Laporte et al., (1992) [42].

1.11 Dynamic or Real-time VRSP

Models discussed so far have been suitable for planning the operations of a
vehicle fleet in advance. However models are also being developed to assist
in the real-time management and control of a distribution operation. To be
effective, these rely on up-to-date information. One type of dynamic model
may consider new customer orders that arise after the routes had been initially
planned, see Bagchi and Nag (1991) [3]. With a common commodity, the
original vehicle routes may be modified to include the new demand. Another
issue is the incorporation of real-time information on the location of the vehicles
and current information on road conditions (such as unexpected congestion
due to an accident). One can refer to Papastavrou [59]. There may be the
opportunity to re-route vehicles in the light of this information to reduce costs
and to meet customer service time windows. The dynamic behavior has given a
name to a typical variant of the VRSP, we name the Dynamic Vehicle Routing
Problem: Minkoff (1993) [54].
The dynamic vehicle routing problem calls for online algorithms that work
in real-time since the immediate requests should be served, if possible. As
conventional static vehicle routing problems are NP - hard, it is not always
possible to find optimal solutions to problems of realistic sizes in a reasonable
amount of computation time. This implies that the dynamic vehicle routing
problem also belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, since a static VRP
should be solved each time a new immediate request is received. Generally,
the more restricted and complex the routing problem is, the more compli-
cated the insertion of new dynamic customers will be (see Hvattum et al.,
(2006) [36]). For instance, the insertion of new customers in a time window
constrained routing problem will usually be much more difficult than in a non-
time constrained problem. Note that in an online routing system customers
may even be denied service, if it is not possible to find a feasible spot to insert
them. Often this policy of rejecting customers includes an offer to serve the
customers the following day of operation. However, in some systems - as for
instance the pick-up of long-distance courier mail - the service provider (dis-
tributor) will have to forward the customer to a competitor when they are not
able to serve them. Others article dealing with the DVRP include Gendreau
and Potvin (1998) [31] and Montemanni et al., (2005) [55]. A case study on
pharmaceutical distribution is relted in de Magalhães and de Sousa [52]. More
details on the DVRP can be found in Zeimpekis and Giaglis (2006) [69].

7
2 Green Logistics Agenda
The consideration of environmental costs is essentially changing the trans-
portation policy in developed countries, especially those within the European
Union. The new environmental sensitivity in today’s societies and govern-
ments has been described in several studies, such as INFRAS/ IWW and
UNITE (INFRAS/IWW [37], Betancor and Nombela [7], Samson et al., [65]).
The European Conference of Ministers of Transport [28] urged European Gov-
ernments to develop new instruments to incorporate externalities and environ-
mental costs in transport management accounting. Therefore, environmental
concerns have highlighted the importance of sustainable transport design.

Road transport is predicted in the EC to grow by a further 33% in the

next 20 years (1 ). These trends indicate that, despite technological advances,
the environmental impacts of transport will grow unless action is taken at all
levels - by government, business and individuals. There is a continuing need
to reduce the environmental impacts of some forms of transport - particularly
road and air travel - and promote more environmentally friendly transport
options such as cycling, public transport and walking.
Road transport services account for 1.6% of the European GDP and give
jobs to 4.5 million people in the EU. The whole economy and society depends
heavily on efficient road transport, 44% of the goods are moved by trucks and
85% of the persons by cars, buses or coaches.
The aim of the Community’s land transport policy is to promote sustain-
able mobility that is efficient, safe and with reduced negative effects on the
environment.

The objectives for road transport are therefore to promote efficient road
freight and passengers transport services, to create fair conditions for com-
petition, to promote and harmonise safer and more environmental friendly
technical standards, to ensure a minimum fiscal and social harmonisation and
to make sure that the rules in road transport are effectively applied without
bad ecological impact.
Carbon dioxide emissions from transport have risen throughout the 1990s
and now account for around one quarter of the UK’s total carbon dioxide emis-
sions. These emissions contribute to climate change that has grave domestic
and global consequences. The Government has recently shown international
leadership by committing the UK to work towards a 60% reduction in its car-
1
Information may be consulted on www.europa.eu (accessed 13/01/2007)

8
bon dioxide emissions by 2050. For a first model one can refer to Davis et al.,
(2005) [18].
Transport contributes to poor air quality. Although discharges of many of
the most damaging air pollutants have declined over the last decade, there
are still “hot spots” in some city centres and along motorway corridors where
concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and particulates from road vehicles exceed
safe levels. The Department of Health estimates that there are between 12,000
and 24,000 early deaths each year resulting from poor air quality in our cities.
More can be found in London Development Agency Report, March 2004 (2 ).

2.1 Some statistics

Some backgrounds statistics recorded by the Department of Transport from
the UK Government are mentioned below:

• Over the past 25 years the number of journeys made by car have increased
while those by foot, rail, bus and cycle have decreased. The majority of
personal travel (93%) and freight movement (65%) is now made by road
(10 year transport plan, DTLR 2000).

• Road traffic in the UK, at 7,800 vehicle kilometres for each member of
the population, is 26% higher than the OECD Europe average (Environ-
mental Performance Reviews, Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development).

• Road transport accounts for around 22% of UK CO2 emissions. For more
details, see (3 ).

• Emissions from road transport are the main causes of chronic hot spots
for particulates and nitrogen dioxide in major urban areas. Road trans-
port emits 44% of the UK’s nitrogen oxides and up to 75% or more of
nitrogen oxides in conurbations. Similarly vehicles account for 20% of
particles nationally but about twice this in conurbations (The Urban En-
vironment in England and Wales - a detailed assessment, Environment
Agency 2002).
2
The Public Health Impact of Cities and Urban Planning, Karen Jochelson, The
King’s Fund, March 2004, www.lda.gov.uk/server/show/ConMediaFile.725 (accessed
15/12/2006)
3
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft transstats/
documents/pdf/dft transstats pdf 026311.pdf (accessed 15/12/2006)

9
 • The proportion of human - induced climate change accounted for by
transport is three times greater than that of the equivalent amount of
ground level emission of carbon dioxide. This is due to the range of
greenhouse gases emitted by engines. For more details are available in
the Publications of the Parliament, 19 July 2006 (4 ).
The Vienna Declaration in 2006, included some important statistics and
views on the fuel used in transport particularly the impact of oil. It
said “Transport accounts for about 70% of annual oil consumption in
the EU. Ninety-six per cent of the fuel burned in internal-combustion
engines comes from mineral oil. No other area of economic activity is
so dependent on oil. In view of the foreseeable shortage of oil resources
and the further price rises this will entail, all-out efforts must be made
to develop oil substitutes for use in transport and, at the same time, to
make transport operations far more energy-efficient. From an environ-
mental perspective, there is no alternative to a strategy of weaning the
economy off oil, and such a strategy cannot succeed unless it focuses on
transport too. In all of this, however, protecting the climate must re-
main the overarching aim. The adverse impact of some oil substitutes,
such as liquidised coal or mined shale, is so drastic that they cannot be
contemplated as sustainable alternatives”. For more details see (5 )

3 Issues linking the VRSP and Green Logis-

tics
There is not much literature that links VRSP models with the Green Logis-
tics issues that have been discussed in the previous section. Most articles are
concerned with objectives of minimizing economic costs. Commercial soft-
ware is also designed to provide feasible solutions that will minimize economic
costs. Many software vendors claim that the use of their VRSP package will
result in economic benefits for their customers from reductions in the number
of vehicles required and distance traveled compared with traditional manual
methods. A recent survey of VRSP software packages has been published in
OR/MS Today [57].
The reduction in total distance will in itself provide environmental benefits
due to the reduction in fuel consumed and the consequent pollutants. However
4
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmenvaud/
981/981we20.htm (accessed 6/12/2006)
5
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/109/
109638.vienna declaration@en.pdf (accessed 13/01/2007)

10
this is generally not measured or emphasized. Palmer (2004) [58] has studied
the connection between vehicle routing and emission in the context of grocery
home delivery vehicles.
There are some examples in the literature where there are some links be-
tween VRSP and the reduction of environmental pollution. These links may
not be direct and such issues are discussed in the following subsections.

3.1 Time-dependent VRSP

The Time Dependent Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem, TDVRSP,
consists in optimally routing a fleet of vehicles of fixed capacity when the
traveling times between nodes depend on the time of the day that the trip on
that arc was initiated. The optimization consists in finding the solution that
minimizes the number of tours (the number of vehicles used) and the total
traveling time. The traveling time is calculated by knowing the departing time
and an accurate estimate of the average speed of the vehicle while traveling on
the arc. This version of the VRSP is motivated by the fact that in so many
circumstances, traffic conditions cannot be ignored, because at peak times,
traffic congestion on popular routes will cause delays. By minimizing the total
traveling time, the solutions produced will tend to direct vehicles to roads
where they can travel at a faster speed instead of being caught in congestion.
It may even be that some solutions imply a greater total travel distance, but
there is likely to be environmental benefit because less pollution is created
when vehicles are traveling at the best speeds for the environment and for
shorter times.
Examples of this approach can be found in the following references Donati
et al., (2003) [22], Malandraki and Daskin (1992) [53].
In fact when dealing with time constraints, like the delivery time windows
for the customers, the optimal solutions known for the classic case become
infeasible and the degree of infeasibility increases with the variability of traf-
fic conditions. So an additional benefit of this approach is that it enables
time window constraints to be satisfied more reliably. For the time depen-
dent model, the travel times may also depend on other factors such as the
day of the week, or the season of the year. These ideas have been treated
in Haghani and Jung (2005) [35] and Chen et al., (2005) [12]. More recently,
Eglese et al., (2006) [25] discussed the issues involved in order to construct
a database of road times for a road network. More details are developed in
Maden (2006) [51].
The data requirements for the TDVRSP are significantly higher than for
conventional models. Instead of simply requiring a distance between nodes on

11
the graph representing the road network, a set of travel times are also required
for every time interval defined. The shortest time path between any two nodes
may be different depending on the time of travel. This is developed in Fu and
Rilett (2000) [30].
The TDVRSP approach is therefore likely to achieve environmental benefits,
but in an indirect way and none of the articles referenced directly measure the
environmental benefit of this approach. Part of the work in Work Package 6
of the Green Logistics project is designed to examine this issue.

3.2 Hazardous Materials Transportation

The transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat) is a significant environ-
mental issue in the transportation industry. There are billions of tons of haz-
mat transported throughout the world every year, most of which are important
raw materials used by various industries. During the transportation process,
one of the most important issues is safety (see Erkut and Verter (1998) [26]).
Accidents, though rarely happening, could have large impacts on humans and
the natural environment, especially in large urban areas. As an important
strategic and tactical problem, the transportation of hazmat has been studied
extensively in the research literature. In the early 1990s, the problem was high-
lighted by researchers and modelled to achieve different objectives, including
the minimization of risk, the minimization of risk to special population cate-
gories, the minimization of travelling time, and the minimization of property
damage (for more details, the reader can refer to Zhang et al., (2005) [70].
According to List et al., (1991) [49], research in this field includes risk analy-
sis, routing/scheduling and facility location. Karkazis and Boffey (1995) [39]
introduce an improved routing model in the context of a realistic environment.

In his introduction to hazmat transportation, Erkut (6 ) says “What else

is relevant in this decision? For example, clearly, the shipment of hazardous
waste will carry some risks to the public along the route, as well as to the
environment. Accidents do happen, and the contents of the truck can be re-
leased in a serious accident. An accident can be quite costly to your company
in several ways; for example the decision makers may be liable for (some of )
the cleanup costs and damages, and they insurance premiums are likely to in-
crease. Hence, they would like to consider minimizing risk, alongside cost.
How should they quantify risk on a stretch of highway? Do they focus on the
likelihood of an accident by the truck, or on the consequences of that accident,
6
http://www.ualberta.ca/ERSC/pages/erhan.htm (accessed 12/01/2007)

12
or both? Should they use historical accident rates on that highway (or highway
class)? What about known danger spots, such as railroad crossings and left
turns? To evaluate the population to be impacted, should they use the num-
ber of people that live within a certain distance of the highway? If so what
should be this distance? How to include buildings with a high concentration of
population (such as schools and hospitals) in their analysis? How to consider
environmental risk? It seems that the problem of selecting the “best” route for
hazardous waste shipment between two destinations is more complicated than
the selection of the route for any long weekend trip.”

There are two major sources of complexity in this problem: quantifying

different objectives, and trading off the objectives. The first one is more of a
technical problem; a problem of identifying the necessary data, collecting and
processing it, and identifying certain good routes via the use of quantitative
modeling techniques. The second one is more of a judgement problem.
Erkut and Ingolfsson (2004) [27] suggest that avoiding a catastrophe (an ac-
cident with a very large consequence) is a relevant issue in routing hazardous
materials and propose three models, two of which are computationally hard
and therefore only offer theoretical insights. Leonelli et al., (2000) [47] employ
a risk-analysis-based routing methodology to solve the hazmat transporta-
tion problem and formulate it as a minimum cost flow problem. A survey
by Luedtke (2002) [50] summarizes some research results on hazmat trans-
portation. Some models have been built as a bi-objective vehicle routing and
scheduling problem.
There is also a unique paper by Kara and Verter (2004) [40] focusing on the
nature of the relationship between the regulator and carriers. A government
has the authority to close certain roads to hazmat transportation, while it is
the carrier’s strategy to choose roads to route their vehicles.

The safe transportation problem of hazmat is a variant of VRPTW, which

considers the vehicle scheduling problem between a depot (a distribution centre
of hazmat) and several customers. Each road segment has an upper bound for
transportation quantity. The transportation is regarded as “safe” if the load
does not exceed the upper bound when a vehicle is passing through a specific
road segment. The objective is to minimize the number of vehicles used and
the total travelling distance, provided that the transportation used is safe on
all road segments. A model of safe transportation of hazardous materials based
on VRPTW is such that each road segment (edge), (i, j), is associated with
a value, vij , which is the upper bound of the load for vehicles passing along
this road segment and determined by the nearby environment. Therefore, the

13
complete scheduled transportation route is safe if the loads of all the vehicles
do not exceed the upper bound of each road segment when passing along it.

Other approaches may aim to assign each vehicle to a different route in order
to spread the risk. In this case the model assigns one and only one route for
each vehicle between the depot and each customer or each pair of customers.
An alternative approach is not to consider the measure of risk as an addi-
tional constraint, but to assign a risk measure to the use of any road link and
then find a set of routes that minimize the total risk as an objective.
Research has primarily addressed route-finding techniques that minimize
either the total travel time, the expected number of accidents (fatal or oth-
erwise), the accident probability, the residential population within a given
distance from the route, the risk of spill, or some combination of these factors.
This research has been surveyed by List et al., [49]. It is immediately apparent
that such single objective models cannot take into account conflicting criteria
such as truck operating costs and expected damage. In fact, other researchers
have considered Hazmat transportation as a bi-objective problem where one
objective relates to risk and the other to the cost of the route (see Zografos
and Davis (1989) [71]).

3.3 Dynamic VRSP

There is potential for environmental benefits to arise from the use of dynamic
or real-time models to manage a distribution activity. This is because vehi-
cles may be redirected to avoid unexpected congestion due, for example, to
an accident. However the implementation of these models requires real-time
information on the locations of the vehicles, current traffic conditions and good
communications between management and drivers (see Bianchi (2000) [6]).

Psaraftis (1980, 1988) [62][63] lists 12 issues where the dynamic vehicle
routing problem differs from the conventional static routing problem. Below
we give a brief summary of these issues as they are indeed very central to our
discussion of static versus dynamic routing.
1. Time dimension is essential. In a static routing problem the time dimen-
sion may or may not be important. In the dynamic counterpart time
is always essential. The dispatcher must as a minimum know the posi-
tion of all vehicles at any given point in time and particularly when the
request for service or other information is received by the dispatcher.

2. The problem may be open-ended. The process is often temporally bounded

14
 in a static problem. The routes start and end at the depot. In a dynamic
setting the process may very well be unbounded. Instead of routes one
considers paths for the vehicles to follow.

3. Future information may be imprecise or unknown. In a static problem

all information is assumed to be known and of the same quality. In a
real-life dynamic routing problem the future is almost never known with
certainty. At best probabilistic information about the future may be
known.

4. Near-term events are more important. Due to the uniformity of the

information quality and lack of input updates all events carry the same
weight in a static routing problem, whereas in a dynamic setting it would
be unwise immediately to commit vehicle resources to long-term require-
ments. The focus of the dispatcher should therefore be on near-term
events when dealing with a dynamic routing problem.

5. Information update mechanisms are essential. Almost all inputs to a

dynamic routing problem are subject to changes during the day of op-
eration. It is therefore essential that information update mechanisms
are integrated into the solution method. Naturally, information update
mechanisms are not relevant within a static context.

6. Re-sequencing and reassigning decisions may be warranted. In dynamic

routing new input may imply that decisions taken by the dispatcher
become suboptimal. This forces the dispatcher to reroute or even reassign
vehicles in order to respond to the new situation.

7. Faster computation times are necessary. In static settings the dispatcher

may afford the luxury of waiting for a few hours in order to get a high
quality solution, in some cases even an optimal one. In dynamic settings
this is not possible, because the dispatcher wishes to know the solution
to the current problem as soon as possible (preferably within minutes
or seconds). The running-time constraint implies that rerouting and
reassignments are often done by using local improvement heuristics like
insertion and k-interchange.

8. Indefinite deferment mechanisms are essential. Indefinite deferment means

the eventuality that the service of a particular demand be postponed
indefinitely because of that demands unfavourable geographical charac-
teristics relative to the other demands. This problem could for instance

15
 be alleviated by using time window constraints or by using a nonlinear
objective function penalizing excessive wait.

9. Objective function may be different. Traditional static objectives such as

minimization of the total distance traveled or the overall duration of the
schedule might be meaningless in a dynamic setting because the process
may be open-ended. If no information about the future inputs is avail-
able, it might be reasonable to optimize only over known inputs. Some
systems also use nonlinear objective functions in order to avoid undesir-
able phenomena such as the above mentioned indefinite deferment.

10. Time constraints may be different. Time constraints such as latest pickup
times tend to be softer in a dynamic routing problem than in a static one.
This is due to the fact that denying service to an immediate demand, if
the time constraint is not met, is usually less attractive than violating
the time constraint.

11. Flexibility to vary vehicle fleet size is lower. In static settings, the time
gap between the execution of the algorithm and the execution of the
routes usually allows adjustments of the vehicle fleet. However, within
a dynamic setting the dispatcher may not have instant access to backup
vehicles. Implications of this may mean that some customers receive
lower quality of service.

12. Queueing considerations may become important. If the rate of customer

demand exceeds a certain threshold, the system will become congested
and the algorithms are bound to produce meaningless results. Although
vehicle routing and queueing theory are two very well-studied disciplines,
the effort to combine these has been scant.

4 Conclusions
“Classical” vehicle routing and scheduling models aim to minimize cost (usu-
ally related to the number of vehicles and distance). This will also provide some
environmental benefit compared with solutions that use unnecessary distance
(because there will be some fuel saving). In their INRETS report, Pronello and
André (2000) [61] suggest that existing models to measure the pollution caused
by a set of vehicle routes may be unreliable. This is because reliable pollution
models require input measures which are not normally part of the output of
VRSP models. For example, the time spent travelling by a vehicle when the

16
engine is cold may have a significant effect on the pollution produced. With-
out these linking models it is difficult to quantify the environmental benefits
of different VRSP solutions.
Even if it is difficult to measure the precise environmental benefit, there
should be some value in versions of VRSP models that consider alternative
objectives to pure economic considerations. For example, the time-dependent
vehicle routing models represent an approach which should indirectly produce
less pollution because vehicles will tend to be directed away from congestion.
A policy which is being considered is the introduction of “Road Pricing”.
The use of roads would be charged in the UK and higher charges would be
levied for vehicles using roads then tend to become congested at particular
times of day. If this policy is adopted, then the development of VRSP models
to minimise costs including the road price may also tend to produce environ-
mental benefits and prevent congestion. However, the environmental benefits
will depend heavily on the size of any additional charges and the schemes that
are applied.
Road Pricing means that motorists pay directly for driving on a particu-
lar roadway or in a particular area. Value Pricing is a marketing term which
emphasizes that road pricing can directly benefit motorists through reduced
congestion or improved roadways. Economists have long advocated Road Pric-
ing as an efficient and equitable way to pay roadway costs and encourage more
efficient transportation. Road Pricing has two general objectives: revenue
generation and congestion management.
However in this literature review of VRSP and Green Logistics, we have
not encountered any models where the objective to be optimized is an envi-
ronmental objective, in terms of a measure of pollution. This is a research
challenge for the future.

17
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