Vehicle route planning with reduced gender-differentiated impact

The logistics sector has long struggled with a lack of gender diversity. Particularly in the freight transport sector, female employees account for a small portion of the entire workforce. Despite the apparent advantages of gender diversity and equality, the study on how transportation design affects gender equality and women’s empowerment is still lacking. As an extension of the traditional vehicle routing approach, the proposed vehicle routing approach considers the male-female perspective that female drivers are more vulnerable to operating in high-risk routes and excessive workload conditions. The model minimizes the total cost comprising the wage, transportation cost, and penalty cost associated with the transportation risk and the excessive energy expenditure. As a result, the model can prevent the operation in high-risk routes. Drivers perform tasks according to their energy expenditure allowances, which differ between males and females. A case study of Chonburi province in Thailand is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed model. The proposed VRP approach determines the route for trucks with male and female drivers to deliver products from a warehouse to supermarkets in the area. In our analysis, the performance of the proposed model is compared to that of the traditional VRP model. A route plan with a good balance between economic performance and favorable working conditions for all drivers can be created by the proposed approach. This research contributes to expanding the current vehicle routing literature by developing a VRP approach that can promote the UN's sustainable development goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Any future application of our proposed model should encourage the participation of female drivers in the freight transport workforce and provide the logistics industry with greater gender diversity.