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Horizontal collaboration has been considered as effective practice for sustainable logistics and freight transport and it has gained increased attention in recent years. This paper aims to provide a survey of the development of horizontal collaborative transport (HCT) over the past ten years, to identify research trends and gaps, then to propose some research opportunities. The paper also aims to provide guidelines to logistics companies who wish to embark on HCT, to help them choose which HCT solution to implement. To provide a comprehensive and structured review, the paper follows the methodology for Systematic Literature Review proposed in the literature. A total of 120 scientific papers published between 2007 and 2017 were reviewed. A survey framework based on two axes-HCT solutions and implementation issues-is developed to analyse and position the papers. The results show that, regarding HCT solutions, carrier alliance and flow controller collaboration were the most frequently studied. But recent innovative solutions such as pooling and physical internet are also gaining increased attention. Regarding implementation issues, the focus of the literature has been on the development of decisionmaking models, including transport planning, lane exchange, and gain sharing. Conversely, managerial and technological issues have received less attention.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.*Related content and download information correct at time of download. Purpose -The development of e-grocery allows people to purchase food online and benefit from home delivery service. Nevertheless, a high rate of failed deliveries due to the customer's absence causes significant loss of logistics efficiency, especially for perishable food. The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative approach to use customer-related data to optimize e-grocery home delivery. The approach estimates the absence probability of a customer by mining electricity consumption data, in order to improve the success rate of delivery and optimize transportation. Design/methodology/approach -The methodological approach consists of two stages: a data mining stage that estimates absence probabilities, and an optimization stage to optimize transportation. Findings -Computational experiments reveal that the proposed approach could reduce the total travel distance by 3-20 percent, and theoretically increase the success rate of first-round delivery approximately by18-26 percent.Research limitations/implications -The proposed approach combines two attractive research streams on data mining and transportation planning to provide a solution for e-commerce logistics. Practical implications -This study gives an insight to e-grocery retailers and carriers on how to use customer-related data to improve home delivery effectiveness and efficiency. Social implications -The proposed approach can be used to reduce environmental footprint generated by freight distribution in a city, and to improve customers' experience on online shopping. Originality/value -Being an experimental study, this work demonstrates the effectiveness of data-driven innovative solutions to e-grocery home delivery problem. The paper also provides a methodological approach to this line of research. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm IntroductionRecent developments of e-commerce have had a significant impact on food supply chains. Today, many traditional grocery retailers offer their customers the opportunity to purchase food items online and have them deliv...

International audienceLogistic networks intensely use means of transportation and storage facilities to deliver goods. However, these logistic networks are still poorly interconnected and this fragmentation is responsible for a lack of consolidation and thus efficiency. To cope with the seeming contradiction of just-in-time deliveries and challenging emissions targets, a major improvement in supply networks is sought here. This new organisation is based on the universal interconnection of logistics services, namely a Physical Internet where goods travel in modular containers for the sake of interconnection in open networks. If from a logical point of view, merging container flows should improve efficiency, no demonstration of its potential has been carried out prior to the here reported research. To reach this potentiality assessment goal, we model the asynchronous shipment and creation of containers within an interconnected network of services, find the best path routing for each container and minimise the use of transportations means. To carry out the demonstration and assess the associated stakes, we use a set of actual flows from the fast-moving consumer goods sector in France. Various transportation protocols and scenarios are tested, revealing encouraging results for efficiency indicators such as CO2 emissions, cost, lead time, delivery travel time, and so forth. As this is a first work in the field of flows transportation, the simulation model and experiment exposes many further research avenues

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International audienceThe popularity of round-the-clock online shopping urges the rapid growth of e-commerce, which substantially generatesadditional parcels for the distribution on the forward side. On the other hand, collecting the returned goods on the revereside is also increasingly becoming a preoccupation, particularly in the crowd and dense metropolitan areas. Inspired by theconcepts of Crowdsourcing and Physical Internet,we propose an innovative solution to collect the e-commerce returned goodsfrom final consumption points back to retailers.As an alternative to traditional ways, this solution delivers the returned goodsand passengers in an integrated way by leveraging the extra loading capacity and constant mobility provided by taxis thatare already reserved to transport passengers. Thus, it could simultaneously migrate the negative economical, environmentaland social impacts of reverse flows management. To address the issue of the returned goods collection, we first conduct thequalitative and quantitative study, and further investigate the feasibility and viability of the solution based on three real-worlddatasets, which consist of locations of shops, a road network and a large-scale trajectory data generated by over 7000 taxisin a month in the city of Hangzhou, China. Three collection strategies are proposed and evaluated. Experimental resultsgenerate several useful insights into the implementability and managerial issues of the proposed solution

This paper provides a literature review of freight transportation service procurement and investigates the challenges and opportunities regarding transportation organization and procurement mechanism design in the context of E-commerce. A total of 78 articles published in academic journals between 1998 and 2017 were reviewed. A framework comprising seven classification criteria is proposed to analyze the articles. The results reveal that new business environments challenge the efficiency and effectiveness of the current leading procurement mechanisms. This work also identifies the trends and gaps from the viewpoints of practitioners and researchers and describes future prospects in new freight transportation markets and organizations.

International audienceTraditional supply chain networks are often designed in the interests of a company. Once the network has been defined, the storage and distribution of goods are usually fixed and restricted within the network. This is assumed to be an inherent limit of current inventory control research. Instead of specialised hierarchical storage networks, this paper proposes an innovative vendor-managed inventory strategy exploiting the Physical Internet (PI), which is an open, universal, interconnected logistics system. In such a system, facilities and means of transport are shared and can be allocated according to demands of users. As a result, the PI allows users to stock anywhere in the network and also provides open multisourcing options for orders with on-demand warehousing services within the PI. Inventory decisions can be made dynamically by each player to minimise networkwide inventory levels. A non-linear, simulation-based optimisation model was developed for the vendors’ inventory decision-making when confronted with stochastic demands. A metaheuristic using simulated annealing was applied to solve the problem, and then, the optimised inventory decisions were validated using simulation. The results suggest that the proposed PI inventory model can reduce the total logistics cost while maintaining a comparable or better level of end customers’ services