The Sustainable Routing Problem

Nowadays environmental, social, and political pressures to limit the impacts associated with CO2 emissions are mounting rapidly. This paper addresses to the solution of a new class of routing problem: the sustainable routing problem, where the objective, differently from the classical approaches, is the CO2 emission minimization. The amount of CO2 emitted by a vehicle depends on different factors. If the problem is analyzed from the driver point of view, these factors can be divided in “internal”, i.e. directly related to him/her (i.e. driving style, acceleration, average speed, route knowledge, etc.), and in “external”, i.e. depending on the environment in which the trip is made (i.e. traffic congestion, speed limits, vehicle type, etc.). Firstly the paper, starting from the of Fonseca et al. (2011) study, proposes an CO2 emission estimation as function of the different internal/external factors. Secondly, the authors formalize a sustainable routing model, validating it through a case study and through a parametrical analysis. The results suggest that, contrary to the classical vehicle routing problem, the proposed model is able to permit a larger reduction of CO2 emission versus the increasing time and distance, suggesting interesting potentials in the environmental preservation.