An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for a Green Vehicle Routing Problem with Depot Sharing

In urban logistics distribution, vehicle carbon emissions during the distribution process significantly contribute to environmental pollution. While developing green logistics is critical for the sustainable growth of the logistics industry, existing studies often overlook the potential benefits of depot sharing among enterprises. By enabling depots belonging to different enterprises to be shared, it would shorten the distance traveled by vehicles returning to depots and reduce carbon emissions. And it would also reduce the number of depots being built. Therefore, a green vehicle routing problem with depot sharing is presented in the paper. To solve this problem, an improved adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm is presented, in which the Split strategy and two new operators are proposed to enhance solution quality and computational efficiency. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted on instances of varying scales to evaluate this algorithm, and also demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that depot sharing significantly reduces carbon emissions, achieving an average optimization rate of 10.1% across all instances compared to returning to the original depot.