Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem for Reverse Logistics Aiming at Low Carbon Transportation

Deployment of green transportation in reverse logistics is a key issue for low carbon technologies. To cope with such logistic innovation, this paper proposes a hybrid approach to solve practical vehicle routing problem (VRP) of pickup type that is common when considering the reverse logistics. Noticing that transportation cost depends not only on dis-tance traveled but also on weight loaded, we propose a hierarchical procedure that can design an economically effi-cient reverse logistics network even when the scale of the problem becomes very large. Since environmental concerns are of growing importance in the reverse logistics field, we need to reveal some prospects that can reduce CO2 emis-sions from the economically optimized VRP in the same framework. In order to cope with manifold circumstances, the above idea has been deployed by extending the Weber model to the generalized Weber model and to the case with an intermediate destination. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ap-proach and to explore the prospects for future green reverse logistics