A Hyperheuristic Approach for Location-Routing Problem of Cold Chain Logistics considering Fuel Consumption.

In response to violent market competition and demand for low-carbon economy, cold chain logistics companies have to pay attention to customer satisfaction and carbon emission for better development. In this paper, a biobjective mathematical model is established for cold chain logistics network in consideration of economic, social, and environmental benefits; in other words, the total cost and distribution period of cold chain logistics are optimized, while the total cost consists of cargo damage cost, refrigeration cost of refrigeration equipment, transportation cost, fuel consumption cost, penalty cost of time window, and operation cost of distribution centres. One multiobjective hyperheuristic optimization framework is proposed to address this multiobjective problem. In the framework, four selection strategies and four acceptance criteria for solution set are proposed to improve the performance of the multiobjective hyperheuristic framework. As known from a comparative study, the proposed algorithm had better overall performance than NSGA-II. Furthermore, instances of cold chain logistics are modelled and solved, and the resulting Pareto solution set offers diverse options for a decision maker to select an appropriate cold chain logistics distribution network in the interest of the logistics company.

A novel bi-objective model of cold chain logistics considering location-routing decision and environmental effects.

Economic, environmental, and social effects are the most dominating issues in cold chain logistics. The goal of this paper is to propose a cost-saving, energy-saving, and emission-reducing bi-objective model for the cold chain-based low-carbon location-routing problem. In the proposed model, the first objective (economic and environmental effects) is to minimize the total logistics costs consisting of costs of depots to open, renting vehicles, fuel consumption, and carbon emission, and the second one (social effect) is to reduce the damage of cargos, which could improve the client satisfaction. In the proposed model, a strategy is developed to meet the requirements of clients as to the demands on the types of cargos, that is, general cargos, refrigerated cargos, and frozen cargos. Since the proposed problem is NP-hard, we proposed a simple and efficient framework combining seven well-known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Furthermore, in the experiments, we first examined the effectiveness of the proposed framework by assessing the performance of seven MOEAs, and also verified the efficiency of the proposed model. Extensive experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of the proposed strategy and variants on depot capacity, hard time windows, and fleet composition on the performance indicators of Pareto fronts and cold chain logistics networks, such as fuel consumption, carbon emission, travel distance, travel time, and the total waiting time of vehicles.

An Effective Approach for the Multiobjective Regional Low-Carbon Location-Routing Problem.

In this paper, we consider a variant of the location-routing problem (LRP), namely the the multiobjective regional low-carbon LRP (MORLCLRP). The MORLCLRP seeks to minimize service duration, client waiting time, and total costs, which includes carbon emission costs and total depot, vehicle, and travelling costs with respect to fuel consumption, and considers three practical constraints: simultaneous pickup and delivery, heterogeneous fleet, and hard time windows. We formulated a multiobjective mixed integer programming formulations for the problem under study. Due to the complexity of the proposed problem, a general framework, named the multiobjective hyper-heuristic approach (MOHH), was applied for obtaining Pareto-optimal solutions. Aiming at improving the performance of the proposed approach, four selection strategies and three acceptance criteria were developed as the high-level heuristic (HLH), and three multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) were designed as the low-level heuristics (LLHs). The performance of the proposed approach was tested for a set of different instances and comparative analyses were also conducted against eight domain-tailored MOEAs. The results showed that the proposed algorithm produced a high-quality Pareto set for most instances. Additionally, extensive analyses were also carried out to empirically assess the effects of domain-specific parameters (i.e., fleet composition, client and depot distribution, and zones area) on key performance indicators (i.e., hypervolume, inverted generated distance, and ratio of nondominated individuals). Several management insights are provided by analyzing the Pareto solutions.