Optimizing Routes with Safety and Environmental Criteria in Transportation Management in Spain: A Case Study

The object of logistic management is to optimise the whole value chain of the distribution of goods and merchandise. One of the main aspects of such an analysis is the optimisation of vehicle routes to deliver final products to customers. There are many algorithms to optimise the related vehicle routing problem. The objective function of that problem usually involves distance, cost, number of vehicles, or profits. This study also takes safety and environmental costs into account. Thus, the authors develop variants to traditional heuristic algorithms, in which they include the traditional costs along with safety and environmental cost estimates for real scenarios in Spain. This methodology is called ASEC (Algorithms with Safety and Environmental Criteria). These considerations raise the value of the global objective function, but permit a more realistic cost estimate that includes not only the internal costs involved in the problem but also the related externalities. Finally, real cases are discussed, and solutions are offered using the new ASEC methodology.