An Intelligent and Sustainable Green Supply Chain Optimization of Transportation Systems Using Classical and Quantum-Powered Computing

Abstract

Transportation strategists increasingly handle heterogeneous fleets under tight service levels, fluctuating costs, and stated environmental targets. This paper addresses the operational Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP) with a practical, mathematically light decision framework that treats sustainability as the main goal of the design. We introduce a Quantum-Inspired Supply Chain and Logistics Optimization Algorithm (QISCLOA), solver-independent HVRP approach for transportation system. Our proposed framework builds a curated, capacity-feasible, and diversified route pool using multi-strategy generation. In our $16\times 16$ HVRP benchmarks, our proposed algorithm reduces elapsed time by up to 98.6% compared with strong classical formulations, while matching classical distance quality and delivering higher load utilization (95–99%) under the same feasibility constraints. Compared with existing classical system, our proposed system preserves full feasibility and comparable distance, shows clear distance-per-demand gains in symmetric unit-demand cases, and attains near-zero solve time on identical Binary Quadratic Models (BQM), evidencing orders-of-magnitude speedups. The proposed model further introduces a load–carbon emission correlation with speed, road-condition, and congestion factors, and the proposed Quantum Annealing (QA) and existing Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) comparison demonstrates competitive solution quality, solver-dependent efficiency, and full logical hardware compatibility. Additionally, we extend the formulation to a multi-depot setting with depot availability, dispatch-capacity, time-window, and Electric Vehicle (EV) charging constraints, and validate it on 21 Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP) benchmark instances to demonstrate scalable multi-depot route selection, while a reduced comparison confirms competitive solution quality and solver-dependent efficiency, with existing QAOA improving overall route distance by 0.63% and proposed QA achieving a 9.14% overall runtime advantage. In multitasking Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) benchmarks used in explicit evolutionary multitasking studies, our approach achieves lower routing cost for both best and average results with a win rate of 81.48%, indicating a lower emission of CO2. Empirically, our proposed method outperforms competitive state-of-the-art approaches in our evaluation metrics while maintaining core feasibility.