Research on Vehicle Scheduling Optimization Model of Precast Concrete Components Considering Carbon Emission Cost

The distribution of precast concrete (PC) components has the characteristics of high time penalty costs, transportation costs, long-term accumulated carbon emission, and long unloading waiting time. These characteristics result in increased distribution costs. Aiming at this problem, the vehicle scheduling (VS) optimization model was proposed to minimize total distribution costs, including transportation costs, unloading waiting costs, carbon emissions costs, and so forth. The proposed model was solved using the genetic algorithm. Finally, the proposed model is verified by a simulation study. The main conclusions are: 1) A PC-component VS model aiming at minimum cost is established, which can provide a better scheme for PC-component VS on the basis of minimizing fixed cost, transportation cost, unloading waiting cost, penalty cost, and carbon cost. 2) This paper constructs a VS model that reflects the loading characteristics of PC components. The type of PC component is added as a judgment variable in the model, and the actual loading weight is calculated according to the type of PC component and the loading requirements. It improves the accuracy of PC component VS results and expands the PC component VS model. 3) Based on this model, some valuable parameters have been sensitively analyzed and some valuable conclusions have been drawn to provide some references for similar cases. For example, carbon emission increases with the increase of freight volume and so on. The result of this study is to provide a cost-minimization VS model with PC components.