Green Vehicle Routing for Small Motor Carriers

This article proposes a simple vehicle-routing technique that can help motor carriers reduce fuel consumption and pollutant emission. This technique is designed specifically for small motor carriers, which, unlike large carriers, may not benefit from modern vehicle-routing techniques because of the lack of technical capabilities to implement such methods or financial power to buy expensive vehicle-routing software products. Since the majority of motor carriers are small in many places (especially in the United States and Europe), it is important that we help this particular segment of the trucking industry (small carriers) reduce their environmental impacts if we wish to minimize the overall impacts of the industry. Computational testing shows that our method not only cuts fuel consumption and pollutant emission, but also reduces road damage.