Emission-Reducing Vehicle Routing in Food Logistics

A web service for emission-reducing vehicle routing in food logistics is presented. This service computes emission-reduced round trips for the transportation of food products from (and to) a depot to (and from) regional locations like food stores or food hubs. Further, this service considers the travelling times between locations and the produced greenhouse gas emissions of the according drives as well as the time windows needed for pickup and delivery. The loading capacities of the vehicles and an efficient "last-in-first-out" packaging order of the vehicles are respected, with the consequence that goods picked-up last should be delivered and unloaded first. This is to avoid unnecessary work.