Optimization of Urban Cold Chain Transport Routes under Time-Varying Network Conditions

Given the time-efficient characteristics of urban cold chain transportation and the time-varying characteristics of urban road speed, customers encounter the problem of limited vehicle path optimization due to a fuzzy time window. An optimization model of urban cold chain transportation with the objective function as the minimum total cost is constructed under the premise of service reliability, and an artificial immune particle swarm optimization algorithm is designed to solve the model. For an empirical analysis of Xiamen’s cold chain transportation, a two-stage solution involving “static optimization and dynamic optimization” is used to verify the effectiveness of the model and the practical value of this research. Results show that the time-varying model can effectively reflect the situation of urban road transportation and satisfy the timeliness requirement of urban cold chain transportation.