Cold-chain distribution routing optimization in time-dependent road networks considering carbon emissions
CHENG Yuandong
DING Chenyang
Abstract：To address the challenges of high transportation costs,elevated spoilage rates,and prominent carbon emissions in cold-chain logistics,this study develops a fresh-product cold-chain vehicle routing optimization model over a time-dependent road network,aiming to minimize total cost.The model jointly considers fixed vehicle usage cost,transportation cost,refrigeration cost,spoilage cost,carbon-emission cost,and time-window penalty cost.An improved African vulture optimization algorithm(AVOA)is proposed to solve the model by introducing an initialization strategy based on time-window centers and spatial savings,an adaptive parameter-control mechanism,and a multi-level local search strategy,while incorporating the global search strategy of the aquila optimizer.Computational experiments show that,when carbon emissions are considered,the improved AVOA reduces total cost by about 25.7%compared with the original AVOA and decreases the required fleet size from 9 to 7 vehicles.Furthermore,the total cost when accounting for carbon emissions is about 1.13%lower than when carbon emissions are not considered.The improved AVOA demonstrates markedly superior route-search capability over traditional algorithms,simultaneously optimizing distribution routes while internalizing carbon-emission costs to achieve both cost reduction and low-carbon delivery.The proposed approach provides an effective solution for cold-chain logistics routing.
Keywords：cold chain logisticstime-dependent road networkpath optimizationcarbon emissionAVOA
Publication Date：2026-01-31
Online Publishing Date：2026-05-22(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：11( 34-43,72 )