The impact of routing on CO₂ emissions at a retail grocery store chain: A GIS-based solution approach

With a world-wide increasing concern for the environment, logistics service providers and freight carriers should be in need of paying more attention to the CO₂ emissions of their operations. This paper investigates the combined impact of multi-trip, fleet composition and vehicle routing decisions on CO₂ emissions and fuel consumptions at one of the major retail grocery store chain. The objective is to minimize the total routing cost which can be defined with respect to the cost of fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions. The CO₂ emissions are proportional to the amount of fuel consumed by the fleet which depends on several parameters. A GIS-based solution approach, uses a tabu search heuristic, applied to a real dataset of the supermarket store chain operates in Turkey. The paper sheds light on the trade-offs between various performance indicators such as number of vehicles and shop demand. Several managerial and policy insights are also presented.