United States Department of Transportation
i
Routing strategies for efficient deployment of alternative fuel vehicles for freight delivery.
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2017-02-01
[PDF-720.67 KB]
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Abstract:With increasing concerns on environmental issues, recent research on Vehicle Routing Problems
(VRP) has added new factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and alternative fuel vehicles into
the models. In this report, we consider one such promising alternative fuel vehicle, Compressed
Natural Gas (CNG). However, due to the limited number of available fueling stations and small
fuel tank capacity, CNG trucks face several challenges on their way to replacing traditional diesel
trucks. Even though CNG trucks have advantages on less greenhouse gas emissions and cheaper
fuel cost, the detours to the fueling station may increase the total travel distance.
We introduce the CNG Truck Routing Problem with Fueling Stations (CTRPFS) to model
decisions to be made with regards to the vehicle routes including the choice of fueling stations.
Moreover we consider load capacity, fuel tank capacity and the driver’s daily traveling distance
limitation. We develop a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model with preprocessing and valid
inequalities to solve the problem optimally. A hybrid heuristic method is also proposed to solve
this problem, which combines an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) with a local search
and a MIP model.
In the numerical experiments section, we solve a set of small instances to show the efficiency
of our preprocessing and valid inequalities. The optimal values from MIP models are used as
benchmarks to show our ALNS can achieve high quality solutions. We run experiments on large
instances to explore some insights on the number of CNG fueling stations and tank capacities.
Based on the estimation of daily goods delivery data from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach, we conduct experiments comparing the total traveling distance using CNG trucks with the
current use of diesel trucks for local delivery.
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