Routing on-road heavy vehicles for alleviating greenhouse gas emissions

The increasing demand for freight transport leads to rising fuel consumption and additional greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This study aims to evaluate the impact of route optimization of heavy vehicles on fuel consumption and GHG emissions. The regular routes of two piloted trucks were extracted and compared with the optimized distances from the simulated model by Network Analyst in Arc GIS. By using Network Analyst and combining it with the Fuel Consumption Rate (FCR) and GHG emission, this study takes a step forward to quantify the amount of fuel usage and GHG emitted from heavy vehicles in the optimized routes versus their regular paths. For this purpose, two different trucks of Blacktown City (Australia) were selected: a waste collector and a tree maintenance truck. The result of the study shows that using the optimized route instead of the regular one can reduce the distance driven by tree maintenance truck by 60%, fuel consumption by 62%, and GHG emissions by 62% per month. In addition, the optimized route shows a 10% reduction in distance travelled, 11% in fuel consumption, and 10% in GHG emission per month. This study also compares fixed-mission and changing-mission trucks. The results in this part show that the fixed mission truck is much more efficient. Therefore, implementing any efficient vehicle routing system will have considerable impacts on the changing-mission trucks.