Cold chain logistics distribution, a vital activity supporting global urbanization, faces complex challenges in balancing economic, environmental, and social objectives. This study investigates the green vehicle routing problem with a mixed fleet, simultaneously optimizing total cost, carbon emissions, and customer satisfaction. To solve this NP-hard problem, a novel multi-strategy NSGA-III algorithm is proposed, which integrates an adaptive pheromone update mechanism, elite route guidance, and genetic operators to significantly enhance search efficiency and solution diversity in complex solution spaces. Computational experiments on benchmark instances and a real-world case demonstrate the algorithm’s superior performance over mainstream multi-objective optimizers like NSGA-III and NSGA-II in metrics such as hypervolume. Sensitivity analysis further elucidates the impact of key operational parameters on system performance and provides a quantitative decision-making basis for greening urban cold chain fleets. This research offers an effective computational tool for complex sustainable logistics problems, with a modeling framework extensible to other industrial systems facing similar multi-objective trade-offs.
Guan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.