Abstract
Green vehicle routing (GVRP) is an active research area that is concerned with the development and analysis of distribution activities with eco-friendly vehicles. We propose a practical solution approach for the GVRP that uses a mixed-integer linear formulation and a reduction procedure. The newly formulation offers two significant advantages: compactness and flexibility. We provide empirical evidence that the formulation and the reduction procedure enable to derive optimal solutions for medium-sized instances using a general-purpose solver. We show that the proposed exact approach consistently outperforms a state-of-the-art branch-and-cut algorithm and constitutes an appealing and practical alternative for optimally solving GVRPs. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd