Two-echelon joint delivery capacitated vehicle routing problem considering carbon emissions of online shopping

Under the environment of a sharing economy and the demand for a low-carbon economy, parcel express companies are compelled to take a fresh view of joint delivery (JD) to enhance horizontal cooperation in the express industry. The purpose of this study is to design an energy-efficient collaborative joint delivery network for different express companies to fulfil the express delivery task. This paper proposes a two-echelon joint delivery capacitated vehicle routing problem (2E-JDCVRP) considering carbon emissions and two distinct fleets of vehicles to optimise the express delivery network in metropolitan areas, while explicitly considering resource sharing between different enterprises. In the 2E-JDCVRP model, the first echelon network requires vehicles at the depots of different express companies to transport the customer demands to satellites that are limitedly shared. The second echelon network concerns the routing of vehicles shared by the satellites to serve all the customers. The objective is to minimise the total cost of the joint distribution of a number of enterprises. A hybrid heuristic algorithm is designed to compute a novel 2E-JDCVRP model that shares idle resources. Computational experiments were conducted to test and verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed 2E-JDCVRP model.