Modelling and multi-criteria analysis of the sustainability dimensions for the green vehicle routing problem

The transport sector leads to detrimental effects on the economy, environment, and citizens quality of life. During recent years, some key-performance indicators have been proposed to quantify these negative impacts on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of the sustainability concept. In this paper, we consider the sustainable vehicle routing problem that takes into account the aforementioned dimensions. We propose a weighted sum model and an epsilon-constraint model that combine the three dimensions, as well as a biased-randomised iterated greedy algorithm to solve the integrated problem. A comprehensive set of experiments and sensitivity analysis have been carried out with newly generated instances, which were adapted from existing vehicle routing benchmark instances. The sensitivity analysis is performed to measure the impact of each sustainability dimension and investigate trade-offs among them.