Promoting Sustainable and Intelligent Freight Transportation Systems in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area

Vehicle Routing Optimization for Pandemic Containment: A Systematic Review on Applications and Solution Approaches

“…Other methods: Heuristics, simulation, and machine learning were rarely used in the reviewed articles. However, to provide a good solution for VRPs in real time, a biasedrandomized heuristic with parallel computing was used to generate the solution within milliseconds [92,107], while deep reinforcement learning was implemented in Tsai et al [98] to enhance the routing efficiency. To schedule multiple vehicles simultaneously in a dynamic traffic condition, Mook et al [101] studied the simulation tool of Simio for the purpose of simulating autonomous cars after configuring the routing decision strategy in the road network.…”

“…Due to the critical nature of sustainability in the post-pandemic era, future studies should emphasize the importance of emission reduction or risk minimization. Shen (2009b) [67] Ceselli (2014) [68] Clarke (2017) [93] Akwafuo (2020) [96] EL Midaoui (2020) [94] Gao (2020) [104] Muslu (2020) [103] Pacheco (2020) [91] Calvet (2020) [92] Gai (2021) [72] Gamchi (2021) [80] Huilin (2021) [52] Long (2021) [79] Table 14. Cont.…”

“…This finding makes sense, given the importance of using pharmaceutical interventions to control the pandemic. In addition, nine articles examined e-commerce logistics services, such as fresh food shipping [69,89,102] and parcel delivery [85,86,90,100,103,106], while four papers referred to on-demand transportation services [70,104,108,109], the use of which has been accelerated by the onset of COVID-19 in urban areas [92]. Among the rest of the articles in this area, one focused on oil distribution and one focused on ready meal delivery in hotels.…”

“…Among fourteen articles that took multiple sustainable factors into account, only six aimed to minimize the emission of pollutant gas together with other objectives. These studies addressed the problem of waste collection [105], parcel delivery [85,90], food distribution [109], and medical supplier transportation [52,92]. The other seven studies concerned with both cost and social factors.…”

“…In addition to the split delivery strategy, Shen et al [67] introduced a strategy in which skipping low-demand customers was allowed in order to satisfy customers' demand as much as possible. Resource: Regarding the characteristics of available resources (i.e., vehicles and depots), most of the reviewed papers considered capacitated vehicles, vehicles are seldom assumed uncapacitated, except in two cases where each vehicle could handle any quantity of small-sized goods [91,92]. In addition, most vehicles were assumed to be heterogeneous (32%) in the review articles.…”