Social-economic sustainable Vehicle Routing Problem for local e-commerce platforms

As all sectors, e-commerce should consider social sustainability which is gaining importance within society. To integrate these themes into the logistics of e-commerce platforms, a mathematical model is proposed for a socially and economically sustainable Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that optimizes the drivers energy consumption along with delivery costs. The model is solved through Simulated Annealing and is validated with a realistic case study for an e-commerce platform. The results show that by assigning a small weight to the social sustainability dimension, the platform can improve by 20% this aspect with a worsening in the economic performances of just 4%.