Green Logistics Optimization Model for Forward and Reverse Logistics Using
Genetic Algorithm
Manoj Kumar1, Dinesh Kumar1
1
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India
(manoj.centura@gmail.com)
Abstract - Green logistics has been receiving much attention
due to more focus mainly on environmental protection and
conservation, green legislations, customer’s increased
awareness for clean environment, and sustainability and this
drives to more importance given to environmental
conservation and protection practices like recycle, reprocess
, reuse and emission control to minimize economic cost and
environmental effects. The reverse logistics is a key
constituent of green logistics. Reverse logistics deal with the
collection re-usable packaging and end of life goods for
recycling or remanufacturing. The present research is
encouraged by the practice oxygen delivery to the hospitals
in a predefined time window. Here a genetic algorithm is
applied in proposed logistics optimization model for
generating routes of two models of VRP for simultaneous
pickup and delivery with time window and two pick up
strategies full pickups and partial pickups. Then routes are
selected after comparison based on a set of economic and
environmental cost factors. The experimental results show
that the total cost is lower for full pickup strategy.
Keywords - GA Genetic Algorithms, TSPTW Travelling
Salesman Problem with Time Window VRP Vehicle Routing
Problems, VRPSDPTW vehicle routing problem with
simultaneous delivery and pick up with time window.
I. INTRODUCTION
Green logistics mainly deals in managing the
manufacturing and logistics for delivery of products and
gathering of packaging and goods for recycling, reuse and
remanufacturing from the end customers in a sustainable
ways by considering economic, social and environmental
effects. Green logistics has been receiving much attention
due to more focus mainly on environmental protection
and conservation, green legislations, customer’s increased
awareness for clean environment, and sustainability [1].
Green logistics practices determine the economic and
environmental effects of various logistics methods,
reducing the intake of energy in transportation, reducing
waste and waste treatment. These practices results in
more economic and environmental benefits for an
organization [2]. A significant research on logistics is
published for improving the economic efficiency and
effectiveness of the logistics but improvement in
environmental protection still remains a challenge. The
practice of simultaneous delivery and pick up reduces the
effort needed for forward and reverse logistics.
Furthermore this practice is preferred by both the
customer and supplier. Adoption of green logistics
practices is more beneficial for some companies as an
978-1-4673-8066-9/15/$31.00
Authorized ©2015
licensed use limited to: IEEE
National
Taiwan Univ of Science and Technology. Downloaded on October 04,2023 at 08:19:24 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
example IBM’s gained profit from an initiative to collect
end of life products for reusing their components in new
products and auctioning used products[3].The
VRPSDPTW is the ideal case of combining reverse and
forward logistics for minimizing the environmental and
economic cost. In VRPSDPTW delivery and pickup is
done simultaneously in time window. The vehicles loaded
with oxygen cylinders starts from a depot and return to
the same depot loaded with empty cylinders. In these
vehicle routes from and to the depot all customers are
served in their respective time windows. The lower and
upper bound of the time window at customer are the
earliest and latest time to start the service. If the vehicle
reaches the customer before the start of earliest service
time then it must wait till the start of earliest service time
to serve the customer and no service is allowed after the
latest start time. The time to load and unload the cylinders
at customer is the service time for that customer. The
route time is the aggregation of travel, waiting and service
times. The travel time is assumed to be proportional to the
distance travelled. Moreover each vehicle is constrained
for the maximum distance travelled. The TSPTW is
defined as NP complete problem by [4] and as the
VRPSDPTW is more difficult than TSPTW. Hence
VRPSDPTW is also a NP complete problem. Since GA is
found suitable for finding the feasible solutions of
VRPSPDTW hence it’s applied here.
There are mainly three variants of time window types [5]
1. Hard time windows: The customer must be
served with the time window bounds.
2. Semi soft time windows: The lower bound of the
time windows is relaxed and the vehicle is
allowed to serve before the earliest service time
with early arrival penalty [6].
3. Soft time window: Both upper and lower bounds
of the time windows are relaxed and service is
allowed outside with time window with penalty
[7].
The hard time windows results in more number of
vehicles and more distance travelled as compared to soft
time windows models. Moreover in real life
circumstances slight deviation from the time windows are
permitted as it yields less cost and does not affect much
delivery service level and customer satisfaction[8].Since
the oxygen cylinders are vital elements in the hospitals
and their shortage may lead to casualty so the hard time
window model is studied in this paper. Two pick up
strategies full and partial pickup for VRPSDPTW namely
VRPSDFPTW and VRPSDPPTW respectively are
717
 Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE IEEM

analyzed for economic and environmental cost. The TABLE I

NOTATIONS FOR VRPSDPTW
VRPSDFPTW collects all the pickup requirements for
end of life products whereas in VRPSDPPTW the pickup Notations Descriptions
amount depends upon the free vehicle space en-route. The , , Indices , , such that , ∈ 0,1,2,3, . . ;
VRPSDPPTW is real circumstances as the total number ∈ 1,2,3, … Ǩ
of pickup is unknown at the star of the route. The paper is Service start time at customer by vehicle and
arranged to cover literature review in section II , customer inanition if vehicle does ‘not serve it.
Distance from node to node
quantitative model for VRPSDPTW in section III of the
The total pick up collected from customers up to node
paper, Genetic Algorithm is explained in section IV, cost and travelled in arc , and it must be positive.
calculations is done in section V, section VI of paper The total demand to be delivered to customers after
provide details of the data used in cost calculations and node i and travelled in arc , and it must be
discussion and future directions are provided in section positive.
decision variable 1,if arc , belongs to the route
VII. operated by vehicle and 0,othererwise
Travel time between nodes and
II. LITERATURE REVIEW

The conventional economic cost factors and

Objective Function
environmental factors are fetching more importance in
forward and reverse logistics plans. The major cause to Minimize ∑Ǩ ∑ ∑ (1)
adopt sustainable logistics for delivery of product and (Minimize total distance travelled)
collection of end of life products are green legislation and
economic benefits of reusing the returned products in Subject to the following constraints
manufacturing process [8] and customer increased ∑ ∑Ǩ 1. (2)
awareness for environment protection and control. Thus, (Ensure that each customer is served once)
environmental effects of logistics have a major say in ∑ -∑ 0. (3)
selecting transport schemes [9] and he also suggested that (Ensure the same vehicle is used for pickup and delivery)
the logistics firms are considering environmental effects ∑ 1. (4)
of transportation as an important decision making
(Ensure total number of vehicles not to exceed Ǩ )
parameter, and that it would be obligatory in future.
∑ -∑ ; ∀ j≠0 and
Therefore, both factors (i.e. Economic and environmental)
must be jointly considered for forward and reverse ∑ -∑ ; ∀ j≠0. (5)
logistics. (Flow equation for pickup and delivery demand
∑Ǩ . (6)
III. QUANTITATIVE MODEL FOR VRPSPDTW (Ensure pick-up and delivery are via arcs from the
solution)
There a set V of N customer nodes on a Euclidean plan 1 . (7)
and set of customers and depot combined is defined as (Time windows constraints)
Customer ′ ′ must be served once for a pickup and . (8)
delivery demand and respectively in a pre-defined (Time windows constraints)
time window , by vehicle ′ ′. Here ′ ′and ′ ′ are ∑ ∑ (9)
the earliest and latest service start time respectively for (Ensure maximum distance constraints L)
start of the service at the customer . The loading and
unloading time at customer location ′ ′ is service time ′ ′
and it upon and ‘ . The vehicle of capacity Q IV. THE GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR VRPSDPTW
units can not serve outside the time window bounds; it has
to wait if it arrives before ′ ′. Total distance travelled by Chromosome Encoding
each vehicle is limited to L. Travel time is assumed to be
proportional to the distance travelled. The route time is A chromosome is a combination of customers and depot
the aggregation of travel, waiting and service times. nodes and it represents the routes. As an example the
chromosome for 8 nodes is represented as
0125602304780 with three routes as 012560, 0230 and
04780.Each chromosome must satisfy all the constraints
mentioned in part II

Population initialization

The population size effects the time to converge and

solution quality. A large population size is needed for

718
Authorized licensed use limited to: National Taiwan Univ of Science and Technology. Downloaded on October 04,2023 at 08:19:24 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE IEEM

better solution quality. The number of feasible solution TABLE II

GA PARAMETERS
depends upon the possible combination of nodes and is
obviously a higher number for large node size. Hence a Sr. No. Parameter value
large population size is randomly generated at the start of 1 Mutation rate 0.02
the GA. 2 Crossover rate 0.95
3 Population size 400
4 Termination criteria 5000 generations and 0.05% after
Fitness Function 400 generations

The fitness function mentioned in equation 1 minimizes

total distance V. COST CALCULATION

Fitness function Min ∑ (10) All cost calculation is done in Indian Rupees (INR) and
cost calculations parameter are presented in table III.

(11) TABLE III

PARAMETERS FOR COST CALCULATIONS

Sr. No. Parameters and Values /comments

Where in equation 11 represents Euclidean distance Descriptions
1. Product cost INR 10000.
from node i to node j in arc , . 2. Reusable Product Cost INR 9400.
3. Fuel cost INR 55/liter
Termination criteria 4. Labor cost INR 87/hour
5. CO2 Emission Cost INR 5.5/Liter
6. Total Vehicles 10
GA is a stochastic method and can run forever without a 7. Total Customer 20
termination criterion and hence termination criterion is 8 Mileage 10 km/litre.
applied. A combination of "total number of generation"
and "Change criterion" is applied as termination criterion. The total cost is aggregate of the followings
As an example total number of generations are fixed to
5000 and change criteria is set as 0.5% after 200 1. Product cost: Oxygen cylinder cost.
generations So in this case GA will check for change in 2. Reusable product cost: empty cylinder cost.
solution after every 200 generations and if the change is 3. Fuel cost: Diesel cost used for the transportation
more than or equal to 0.5% it will run for next 200 4. Labour cost: Drivers cost.
generations and check for change again if the change is 5. CO2 Emission Cost: It is the cost of emission per
less than 0.5% it will terminate the algorithms. unit fuel consumed in INR.
Chromosome Selection The total cost for all routes is calculated as
Total cost Product cost Reusable product cost
Chromosomes are selected for crossover based upon their Labour cost Fuel cost
fitness function value using binary tournament. C02 emission cost
Crossover and mutation

The crossover is done to generate new solutions by order 0

crossover (OX) operator. In order crossover items are
placed from one parent to another parent and then its Here is the total distance travelled and
remaining items are wrapped based upon their order in is the total route time.
other parent .In mutation genes are randomly swapped in
a chromosome. The number of swaps depends upon the
mutation rate (0 to 1). VI. EXPERIMENTS

Chromosome Decoding VRPSDPPTW Model

The chromosome having least fitness function value is The pick-up and delivery demands for 20 customers are
decoded to vehicle routes as sub optimal solutions. given in table 4. A total of 254 cylinders are delivered and
220 cylinders are picked up by 6 vehicles
The parameters are used for GA are mentioned in Table II

719
Authorized licensed use limited to: National Taiwan Univ of Science and Technology. Downloaded on October 04,2023 at 08:19:24 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE IEEM

TABLE IV is done. It is found from the results that the environmental

DELIVERY AND PICKUP DEMAND FOR VRPSDPPTW
lower for VRPSDFPTW model. The contribution of this
Node Delivery/ Node Delivery/
paper is to compare the economic and environmental cost
Number pickup Number pickup associated with different pick up strategies. The future
1 10/3 11 45/32 work can be done to analyses the impact of different time
2 15/10 12 12/11 windows, fuzzy pickup and delivery demand on economic
3 11/9 13 19/14
4 15/8 14 23/15 and environmental cost .The cost calculations for multi
5 4/9 15 12/10 echelon supply chain system can be considered as an
6 12/8 16 7/6 extension to the current work.
7 33/24 17 8/9
8 12/10 18 3/3
9 45/22 19 6/7 REFERENCES
10 12/9 20 8/1
[1] M. Thierry, M. Salomon, J. Van Nunen, and L. Van
180
Route -1
Wassenhove, “Strategie Issues in Product Recovery
160
Route
Route
-2
-3
Management,” Calif. Manage. Rev., vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 114–
140
Route
Route
-4
-5 135, Jan. 1995.
Route -6
[2] A. Sbihi and R. W. Eglese, “Combinatorial optimization
120
and Green Logistics,” Ann. Oper. Res., vol. 175, pp. 159–
Y Axis

100
175, 2010.
80 [3] M. Fleischmann, J. A. E. E. van Nunen, and B. Gräve,
60 “Integrating Closed-Loop Supply Chains and Spare-Parts
40
Management at IBM,” Interfaces (Providence)., vol. 33, no.
6, pp. 44–56, Nov. 2003.
20
0 20 40 60 80
X Axis
100 120 140 160 180 [4] M. W. P. Savelsbergh, “Local search in routing problems
with time windows,” Ann. Oper. Res., vol. 4, no. 1, pp.
Fig. 1. Route Plan for VRPSDPPTW 285–305, 1985.
180
Route
Route
-
-
1
2
[5] O. Bräysy, W. Dullaert, and M. Gendreau, “Evolutionary
160 Route
Route
Route
-
-
-
3
4
5
Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time
140
Route
Route
-
-
6
7
Windows,” J. Heuristics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 587–611, 2004.
[6] a. G. Qureshi, E. Taniguchi, and T. Yamada, “An exact
120
YAxis

solution approach for vehicle routing and scheduling

100

80
problems with soft time windows,” Transp. Res. Part E
60

40
Logist. Transp. Rev., vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 960–977, 2009.
20
[7] A. G. Qureshi, E. Taniguchi, and T. Yamada, “Exact
0 20 40 60 80 100
X-Axis
120 140 160 180 200
solution for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Semi Soft
Fig. 1. Route Plan for VRPSDFPTW Time Windows and its application,” Procedia - Soc. Behav.
Sci., vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 5931–5943, 2010.
VRPSDFPTW Model [8] Y. Gajpal and P. Abad, “An ant colony system (ACS) for
vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and
The pick-up and delivery demands for 20 customers are
pickup,” Comput. Oper. Res., vol. 36, no. 12, pp. 3215–
given in table V. A total of 250 cylinders are delivered 3223, 2009.
and 250 cylinders are picked up by 7 vehicles [9] P. R. Murphy and R. F. Poist, “Green perspectives and
practices: a ‘comparative logistics’ study,” Supply Chain
TABLE V Manag. An Int. J., vol. 8, no. 1998, pp. 122–131, 2003.
DELIVERY AND PICKUP DEMAND FOR VRPSDFPTW

Node Delivery/ Node Delivery/

Number pickup Number pickup
1 10/10 11 45/45
2 15/15 12 12/12
3 11/11 13 19/19
4 15/15 14 23/23
5 4/4 15 12/12
6 12/12 16 7/7
7 33/33 17 8/8
8 12/12 18 3/3
9 41/41 19 6/6
10 12/12 20 8/8

VII. DISCUSSION

Here two types of VRPSDPTW namely VRPSDFPTW

and VRPSDPPTW are solved using Genetic Algorithms
and then comparison of economic and environmental cost

720
Authorized licensed use limited to: National Taiwan Univ of Science and Technology. Downloaded on October 04,2023 at 08:19:24 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.