Research on carbon emission reduction in road freight transportation sector based on regulation-compliant route optimization model and case study

Abstract Recently, carbon emissions increase apparently in road freight transportation section accompanied with rapidly development of logistics industries in China. However, many published researches used carbon emission calculation model to plan the optimized road transportation route regardless of local regulation-compliant constraints. This study fills this gap by improving carbon emission calculation model for road transportation with several regulation-compliant constraints, such as driving-duration limitation constraint. A transportation route planning case of starting from a logistics hub to a logistics demand node in China is employed to get an optimized Road Freight Transportation Route Strategy (RFTRS). We found that: (1) The carbon emission calculation model in this research gets rid of lack consideration of regulation-compliant constraints of developed carbon emission reducing models in the literature. The optimized RFTRS with the lowest carbon emission is not necessarily meeting driving duration limitation within local traffic regulations and also not with the lowest expenditure in transportation process. (2) The optimized RFTRS should not include too many commodity transfers in intermediate nodes or plan logistics function nodes in reverse-order. In the case, low carbon emission and regulation-compliant requirements for RFTRS are all achieved simultaneously in the shortest expressway routing scenario. (3) The RFTRS optimization process in the case means that high grade roads, such as expressways, and the shorter length of transportation route are the prior selections.