Green Transportation and the Role of Operation Research

ABSTRACT Transportation industry, as the carrier of goods and passengers, is undeniably one of the fundamental infrastructures, necessary for economic and industrial growth and development. Road transportation, in this amidst, has still kept its popularity, and in spite of air, sea and rail transportation developments, companies rely greatly on road transportation as the most dependable choice yet. At the same time it is one of the hugest consumers of petroleum products, and thus a big contributor to greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions in the air. Being a threatening issue, environmental impacts of different industries as a whole, and transportation pollution as specific, ought not to be neglected anymore and immediate and proper studies as well as actions need to be thought of in dealing with this predicament. “Green Transportation” is a highly interdisciplinary area and researchers and scholars of different realms of knowledge, including automotive engineers, policy makers, management intellectuals, urban planners, chemical engineers, and others, are trying to reduce CO2 emissions from the sector. Them amongst the lagging behind, but pivotal and accommodating role of operation research (OR), with its becoming tool of optimization, has not been fully regarded and needs to be more deeply reviewed. This paper tries to bridge this gap by providing an insight into what OR may contribute to the problem, by reviewing how it has already done it and how it is going to. Keywords: Green Transportation, Operation Research (OR), Vehicle routing problem (VRP), Supply chain reengineering, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS