Title: Green GAS heuristics for the routing problem

Authors: Sachin Sreekumar; S. Ram Narayan; E.S. Devnath; K. Ganesh; S.P. Anbuudayasankar; V.R. Sathishkumar; M.S. Narassima

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India ' Center of Competence, McKinsey & Company Inc, Chennai – 600113, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India

Abstract: Logistics and supply chain management can provide several ways to improve the efficiency and productivity across the supply chain which in turn contributes significantly to greater economies of scale. One of the ways to achieve this is by ensuring proper quantities of storage at the point of demand and ensuring the best possible distribution plans, including routing of the distribution vehicles. There has been a sudden surge in the amount of CO₂ emissions in recent years and therefore a regulation on these emissions is the need of the hour. This inventory routing problem aims at integrating the routing of vehicles used for collection and distribution. In this paper, a three-staged method named GAS: grouping of nodes, allocation of the right quantities to these nodes and serving through these grouped nodes is proposed. The proposed method is made greener by considering the carbon footprint in the chain and will provide optimal solutions that can be implemented in distribution systems in a supply chain.

Keywords: heuristics; logistics; routing problem; sustainability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2022.127084

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2022 Vol.43 No.3, pp.317 - 335

Received: 22 Jun 2020
Accepted: 19 Aug 2020
Published online: 22 Nov 2022 *

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