Distribution Path Selection Of Courier Companies Study Considering Carbon Emissions

As global warming intensifies, and haze recurrent in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Jinan and other cities of our country, the government’s efforts on environmental protection is growing. Industries are facing pressures of reducing GHG emissions, especially transportation, which is a large emitter of GHG. Logistics industry is an important part of urban transportation, engaged in logistics and distribution companies, express companies, under the stimulation of e-commerce, develop rapidly particularly. The annual volume of business, employment promotation and the number of new vehicles put into operation are far ahead of the general logistics and distribution companies. In response to national policy of carbon emissions reduction, some large courier companies have made improvements, such as use packaging material of low emissions and introduction of clean energy vehicles.However, few companies try to reduce carbon emissions on the distribution vehicle routing selection. Based on this, through analysis of the characteristics of low-carbon distribution, this paper obtain a summary that in addition to advanced technology and clean energy, it should be also taken into account of optimizing the distribution path to achieve low-carbon goal. Compared with the general logistics and distribution, express delivery companies pursue higher requirements on timeliness. Through combination of the above two, the distribution path selection of courier companies with low-carbon emission should conclude three respectives of vehicle numbers minization, travel time costs minization and carbon emissions minization.In this paper, the model is based on the time-dependent vehivle routing problem. To avoid "the passing", travel speed was assumed as a function of system planning time to meet time dependent, and travel time was achieved indirectly through diatance and speed. Carbon emissions minization was one of the goals.In order to solve the model, a multi-population genetic algorithm was proposed, which has good characteristics to avoid premature convergence of standard genetic algorithm. To achieve the diversity of polulations, on the one hand, three initial solutions were obtained through saving algorithm, greedy algorithm and random generation to initialize three populations; on the other hand, various populations were given various mutation rules.Finally, took a courier company as an example, application of its data of distribution network in Chengdu and early peak distribution data daily. The results proved good convergence of multi-population algorithm to solve emission minimization vehicle routing problem. Through comparation of model with low-carbon or not, an uncovered conclution was obtained that results of model considering low-carbon emissions were better both in trvavel time costs and carbon emissions costs, which indicated that for courier companies, considering carbon emissions reduction on distribution path selection would not make operation costs increasing.