In response to violent market competition and demand for low-carbon economy, cold chain logistics companies have to pay attention to customer satisfaction and carbon emission for better development. In this paper, a biobjective mathematical model is established for cold chain logistics network in consideration of economic, social, and environmental benefits; in other words, the total cost and distribution period of cold chain logistics are optimized, while the total cost consists of cargo damage cost, refrigeration cost of refrigeration equipment, transportation cost, fuel consumption cost, penalty cost of time window, and operation cost of distribution centres. One multiobjective hyperheuristic optimization framework is proposed to address this multiobjective problem. In the framework, four selection strategies and four acceptance criteria for solution set are proposed to improve the performance of the multiobjective hyperheuristic framework. As known from a comparative study, the proposed algorithm had better overall performance than NSGA-II. Furthermore, instances of cold chain logistics are modelled and solved, and the resulting Pareto solution set offers diverse options for a decision maker to select an appropriate cold chain logistics distribution network in the interest of the logistics company.

The multiobjective vehicle routing problem considering customer satisfaction (MVRPCS) involves the distribution of orders from several depots to a set of customers over a time window. This paper presents a self‐adaptive grid multi‐objective quantum evolutionary algorithm (MOQEA) for the MVRPCS, which takes into account customer satisfaction as well as travel costs. The degree of customer satisfaction is represented by proposing an improved fuzzy due‐time window, and the optimization problem is modeled as a mixed integer linear program. In the MOQEA, nondominated solution set is constructed by the Challenge Cup rules. Moreover, an adaptive grid is designed to achieve the diversity of solution sets; that is, the number of grids in each generation is not fixed but is automatically adjusted based on the distribution of the current generation of nondominated solution set. In the study, the MOQEA is evaluated by applying it to classical benchmark problems. Results of numerical simulation and comparison show that the established model is valid and the MOQEA is effective for MVRPCS.

Economic, environmental, and social effects are the most dominating issues in cold chain logistics. The goal of this paper is to propose a cost-saving, energy-saving, and emission-reducing bi-objective model for the cold chain-based low-carbon location-routing problem. In the proposed model, the first objective (economic and environmental effects) is to minimize the total logistics costs consisting of costs of depots to open, renting vehicles, fuel consumption, and carbon emission, and the second one (social effect) is to reduce the damage of cargos, which could improve the client satisfaction. In the proposed model, a strategy is developed to meet the requirements of clients as to the demands on the types of cargos, that is, general cargos, refrigerated cargos, and frozen cargos. Since the proposed problem is NP-hard, we proposed a simple and efficient framework combining seven well-known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Furthermore, in the experiments, we first examined the effectiveness of the proposed framework by assessing the performance of seven MOEAs, and also verified the efficiency of the proposed model. Extensive experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of the proposed strategy and variants on depot capacity, hard time windows, and fleet composition on the performance indicators of Pareto fronts and cold chain logistics networks, such as fuel consumption, carbon emission, travel distance, travel time, and the total waiting time of vehicles.

With the aim of reducing cost, carbon emissions, and service periods and improving clients’ satisfaction with the logistics network, this paper investigates the optimization of a variant of the location-routing problem (LRP), namely the regional low-carbon LRP (RLCLRP), considering simultaneous pickup and delivery, hard time windows, and a heterogeneous fleet. In order to solve this problem, we construct a biobjective model for the RLCLRP with minimum total cost consisting of depot, vehicle rental, fuel consumption, carbon emission costs, and vehicle waiting time. This paper further proposes a novel hyper-heuristic (HH) method to tackle the biobjective model. The presented method applies a quantum-based approach as a high-level selection strategy and the great deluge, late acceptance, and environmental selection as the acceptance criteria. We examine the superior efficiency of the proposed approach and model by conducting numerical experiments using different instances. Additionally, several managerial insights are provided for logistics enterprises to plan and design a distribution network by extensively analyzing the effects of various domain parameters such as depot cost and location, client distribution, and fleet composition on key performance indicators including fuel consumption, carbon emissions, logistics costs, and travel distance and time.

In this paper, we consider a variant of the location-routing problem (LRP), namely the the multiobjective regional low-carbon LRP (MORLCLRP). The MORLCLRP seeks to minimize service duration, client waiting time, and total costs, which includes carbon emission costs and total depot, vehicle, and travelling costs with respect to fuel consumption, and considers three practical constraints: simultaneous pickup and delivery, heterogeneous fleet, and hard time windows. We formulated a multiobjective mixed integer programming formulations for the problem under study. Due to the complexity of the proposed problem, a general framework, named the multiobjective hyper-heuristic approach (MOHH), was applied for obtaining Pareto-optimal solutions. Aiming at improving the performance of the proposed approach, four selection strategies and three acceptance criteria were developed as the high-level heuristic (HLH), and three multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) were designed as the low-level heuristics (LLHs). The performance of the proposed approach was tested for a set of different instances and comparative analyses were also conducted against eight domain-tailored MOEAs. The results showed that the proposed algorithm produced a high-quality Pareto set for most instances. Additionally, extensive analyses were also carried out to empirically assess the effects of domain-specific parameters (i.e., fleet composition, client and depot distribution, and zones area) on key performance indicators (i.e., hypervolume, inverted generated distance, and ratio of nondominated individuals). Several management insights are provided by analyzing the Pareto solutions.

In this paper, we consider a variant of the location-routing problem (LRP), namely, the regional low-carbon LRP with reality constraint conditions (RLCLRPRCC), which is characterized by clients and depots that located in nested zones with different speed limits. The RLCLRPRCC aims at reducing the logistics total cost and carbon emission and improving clients satisfactory by replacing the travel distance/time with fuel consumption and carbon emission costs under considering heterogeneous fleet, simultaneous pickup and delivery, and hard time windows. Aiming at this project, a novel approach is proposed: hyperheuristic (HH), which manipulates the space, consisted of a fixed pool of simple operators such as “shift” and “swap” for directly modifying the space of solutions. In proposed framework of HH, a kind of shared mechanism-based self-adaptive selection strategy and self-adaptive acceptance criterion are developed to improve its performance, accelerate convergence, and improve algorithm accuracy. The results show that the proposed HH effectively solves LRP/LRPSPD/RLCLRPRCC within reasonable computing time and the proposed mathematical model can reduce 2.6% logistics total cost, 27.6% carbon emission/fuel consumption, and 13.6% travel distance. Additionally, several managerial insights are presented for logistics enterprises to plan and design the distribution network by extensively analyzing the effects of various problem parameters such as depot cost and location, clients’ distribution, heterogeneous vehicles, and time windows allowance, on the key performance indicators, including fuel consumption, carbon emissions, operational costs, travel distance, and time.