Vehicle Routing to Minimize Mixed-Fleet Fuel Consumption and Environmental Impact

Efficient vehicle routing is critical to the operational profitability and customer satisfaction of vehicle fleetrelated businesses, especially in light of increasing, and highly volatile, fuel prices. Growing pressures to reduce negative environmental impacts have suggested that a second metric (vehicle emissions) should also be considered in vehicle routing. Currently, the majority of existing tools use distance as a surrogate for cost. When considering a mixed fleet of multiple vehicle types, with individual vehicles within a fleet type also varying by age and vehicle health, this surrogate becomes significantly less accurate. Furthermore, using distance as a surrogate fails to capture the variations between city and highway driving, which are particularly striking for hybrid vehicles. We thus propose a new approach to the vehicle routing problem, specifically targeting applications with mixed fleets including clean-vehicle technologies, in recognition of the limitations of the existing approaches.