In the transportation planning, one way to combat with greenhouse gases and air pollutants associated with oil consumption is to use alternative energy sources. However, the lack of infrastructures such as refueling stations is one of the major barriers to the general acceptance of alternative-fuel vehicles (AFVs). In this study, we address the green vehicle routing problem with AFV fleet where refueling decisions are also taken into account during the route planning. First, a modified version of two existing mathematical models are reviewed and valid inequalities are derived to improve the linear programming (LP) relaxation bounds. Then, a novel path-based model is presented. Computational results compare the three models in terms of the LP-relaxation bound and solution time and justify that compared with previous models, the path-based model not only has better LP-relaxation bound, but also if the number of potential paths is not too large, its solution time is greatly less than that of previous models.
