Abstract: From a new perspective of saving energy and reducing emissions, a vehicle routing problem under low-carbon environment is studied, in which transportation services are provided by a third party. The costs of energy, carbon emissions and vehicle leasing are considered simultaneously, which depend not only on distance, but also on client demands and vehicle speed. An energy consumption calculation method is proposed taking into account the vehicle weight and speed. Using the peddling shipment strategy, a low-carbon routing model named LCRP is built. Then, a tabu search algorithm named RS-TS using routes splitting method is designed to solve this model. This algorithm introduces a novel routes encoding and decoding algorithms named WSS, and adopts three neighborhood search methods. Computational results of benchmark instances verify that this algorithm is effective to search the satisfactory solutions, which also shed light on the tradeoffs of distance, energy, travel time and other parameters. Experimental analysis shows that the low-carbon routing arrangement is more economic and environmentally friendly, and selecting medium or low traffic speed is better to save energy consumption and reduce carbon emissions.

Key words: low-carbon environment, vehicle routing problem, tabu search algorithm, energy consumption, environmental protection