Environmental consideration in heterogeneous vehicle fleet assignment using cuckoo search

Road transport has been reported as a key contributor to environmental emissions. As the logistics network has become more complex nowadays, vehicle travelling distances, logistics cost, and the corresponding environmental burdens for transporting tangible goods have also increased. Typically, for small-and-medium sized enterprises (SMEs), a small scale of vehicle fleet is usually owned to support their pickup and delivery works but the scheduling of heterogeneous vehicle fleet is very often determined by intuitive judgement of the decision makers. In light of the heightened public awareness on environmental protection and energy saving, enterprises are in need of a systematic tool to support their decisions that could balance between cost and environmental burdens. This study has proposed an objective approach that utilises the Cuckoo Search algorithm to obtain an optimised solution for logistics planning factoring in the impact to both the environmental and cost dimensions. This proposed approach offers an end-of-pipe solution for an optimised assignment of the heterogeneous vehicle fleet and no further result interpretation is required. The approach is simple and efficient for implementation, applicable for the daily logistics planning in relation to heterogeneous vehicle fleet assignment.