Developing a hybrid genetic algorithm in a vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup with time windows: optimising fuel consumption

The environmental deterioration due to fossil fuel burning is the significant issue in logistic industry. This issue motivates the transportation industry to improve distribution activities. The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is concerned with developing eco-distribution activities in the logistics industry. Therefore, this study considers the VRP with simultaneous delivery and pickup with time windows (VRPSDPTW), a variant of VRP and develops an environmental fuel optimisation model for VRPSDPTW to optimise the vehicle fuel consumption. This study proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) to solve the developed fuel optimisation model and applies GA to examine the operational efficiency of HGA. Finally, this study executes the computational experiment of two algorithms to solve the developed model under two alternate issues, i.e., fuel-oriented and distance-oriented. We found that the developed model under the fuel-oriented module reduces better fuel consumption, and the HGA performs better than GA regarding fuel consumption.