Vehicle Routing Perfection for Fresh Agricultural Products Distribution Under Carbon Emission Regulation and Customer Satisfaction

Under the background of “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality”, carbon reduction is not only a realistic need for the high-quality development of the national economy, but also a key way for the sustainable development of enterprises. Cold chain logistics has the characteristics of high energy consumption and high carbon emissions. Fresh distribution requirements of fresh agricultural products may increase carbon emissions in the cold chain distribution process. Based on customer satisfaction and aiming at minimizing carbon emission and comprehensive distribution cost, this paper establishes an optimization model of cold chain logistics distribution routes for fresh agricultural products. First of all, a two-objective optimization model is proposed considering customer satisfaction maximization and comprehensive cost minimization, including fixed cost, fuel cost, carbon emission cost, cargo damage cost, and time window penalty cost. And when constructing customer satisfaction function, we mainly pay attention to the time factor. Secondly, a hybrid ant colony algorithm, which combines improved ant colony algorithm and local search algorithm 3-opt, is designed to solve the model. Thirdly, a hybrid ant colony algorithm is applied to the simulation example of fresh agricultural products distribution through experimental simulation, and the results are compared with the traditional ant colony algorithm and improved ant colony algorithm. Finally, the results reveal that the average total cost of the hybrid ant colony algorithm is lower than that of the traditional ant colony algorithm and the improved ant colony algorithm, achieving nearly 8.159% and 4.622% cost savings, respectively, and in terms of customer satisfaction, the new algorithm is slightly better than the other algorithms. The results show that the method can effectively optimize the cold chain logistics distribution routes of fresh agricultural products, and reduce carbon emission and distribution cost.