The present article proposes a two-echelon vehicle routing problem wherein the routing problem of the first echelon specifies the goods delivery from the main depot to the intermediate depots and the routing problem of the second echelon has been formed based on goods delivery from the intermediate depots to a set of customers. On the other hand, making plans for on-time providing of services to the customers entails the consideration of traffic limitations for the effects they exert on the costs and vehicle’s providing of on-time services to the customers. Moreover, the amount of pollution dispersed by a vehicle depends on the weight, speed and other factors and it can bring about changes in the emission of greenhouse gases, fuel consumption and travel time. Therefore, the main problem of the present article is a two-echelon distribution system wherein the traffic limitations influence the vehicles’ providing of services to the customers on the due date with the objective of minimizing the greenhouse gases’ emission hence reducing the fuel consumption. The proposed problem has been modeled in the form of a mathematical mixed integer planning method. Considering the fact that the problem is NP-hard, the neighborhood search metaheuristic algorithm has been used for solving the problem. In order to verify and confirm the proposed algorithm’s performance in smaller dimensions, the results obtained from variable neighborhood search algorithm were compared with those obtained by CPLEX solver. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm in larger dimensions, a set of the sample problems has been solved based on the scales existent in the literature but with a little change. The obtained results indicated the suitable performance of the proposed algorithm.
