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Int. J. Services and Operations Management, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2013

The sustainable routing problem

Maurizio Faccio*, Alessandro Persona and
Giorgia Zanin
Department of Management and Engineering,
University of Padova,
Stradella San Nicola 3, 36100, Vicenza Italy
Fax: +39-0498276816
E-mail: maurizio.faccio@unipd.it
E-mail: alessandro.persona@unipd.it
E-mail: zanin@gest.unipd.it
*Corresponding author
Abstract: Nowadays environmental, social, and political pressures to limit the
impacts linked to CO2 emissions are rapidly increasing. This paper aim at the
solution of a new class of A routing problem: the sustainable routing problem,
where the objective, unlike the classical approaches, is the CO2 emission
minimisation. The amount of CO2 emitted by a vehicle depends on different
factors. If the problem is analysed from the drivers point of view, these factors
can be divided into internal, i.e., directly related to him/her (i.e., driving style,
acceleration, average speed, route knowledge, etc.), and into external, i.e.,
depending on the environment in which the trip is made (i.e., traffic congestion,
speed limits, vehicle type, etc.). Firstly the paper, starting from Fonseca et al.
(2011) study, proposes a CO2 emission estimation as function of the different
internal/external factors. Secondly, the authors formalise a sustainable routing
model, validating it through a case study as well as a parametric analysis. The
results suggest that, contrary to the classical vehicle routing problem, the
proposed model allows a larger reduction of CO2 emission versus the
increasing time and distance, suggesting interesting potentials in the
environmental preservation.
Keywords: routing problem; sustainability; CO2 emission; vehicle emission
factors; urban congestion.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Faccio, M., Persona, A. and
Zanin, G. (2013) The sustainable routing problem, Int. J. Services and
Operations Management, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp.310336.
Biographical notes: Maurizio Faccio graduated in Engineering Management at
University of Padova with evaluation 110/110 Cum Laude, discussing a thesis
concerning: Mixed-Model Assembling Line Balancing Problem in December
2003. On January 2005, he began his PhD in Mechatronics and Industrial
System at University of Padova. Since June 2006, he has been an Assistant
Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Padova in ING-IND/17
SDS. Since 2003, he has been carrying out his own research activities at
University of Padova and the principal activities of his research are about
industrial system and service industrial system design, productive plant design,
production and logistic system management.

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