۱- Introduction

۲- Road transportation

۳- Maritime transportation

۴- ‘Greening’ other modes of transport

۵- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increased awareness of the negative external impacts of freight transportation. The field of Operational Research (OR) has, particularly in the recent years, continued to contribute to alleviating the negative impacts through the use of various optimization models and solution techniques. This paper presents the basic principles behind and an overview of the existing body of recent research on ‘greening’ freight transportation using OR-based planning techniques. The particular focus is on studies that have been described for two heavily used modes for transporting freight across the globe, namely road (including urban and electric vehicles) and maritime transportation, although other modes are also briefly discussed.

Conclusions

This work set out to answer a question that concerns the role of OR in green freight transportation. Whilst we do not claim to have provided a complete answer, nor believe that such an endeavor is a simple task, we suggest here, on the basis of the work surveyed in this paper, that there are at least three fundamental roles that OR can continue to play in this area of research: 1. To devise methods, tools and algorithms that help design effective transportation plans that capture the trade-off between environmental and economic performance, with the ultimate goal of arriving at win-win solutions. To achieve this goal, however, one must carefully consider, for a particular freight transportation problem (a) who the players are, and the criteria by which they ‘win’. The review of the current body of work in this area, at least on two major modes of transport, has revealed that problems are often solved for a single player (e.g., an individual freight operator), where the win criterion is the ability to jointly reduce internal and external costs, but with an emphasis on the former.