A New Solution for City Distribution to Achieve Environmental Benefits within the Trend of Green Logistics: A Case Study in China

Abstract

Green logistics has become a consensus and an important method to achieve sustainable development in industrial activities. However, the traditional direct distribution mode has high carbon emissions, an uncertain delivery time, and a low delivery efficiency. Uncoordinated resource allocations and unreasonable network layouts of terminal distributions have shackled green development within the express delivery industry. Considering the trend of green logistics, this study innovatively proposes a comprehensive and environmentally friendly mode for city distribution based on end crowdsourcing service stations (ECSSs). This study also adopts node centrality indices of complex network theory to evaluate the node importance of existing terminal distribution outlets. The comprehensive weights of the indices are obtained via the three-scale AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and TOPSIS (Technology for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) methods to identify the candidate nodes for ECSSs. Finally, a location model is built to determine the optimal location to establish the ECSSs. A real-world case study was conducted to provide the location scheme of ECSSs in Beijing, China. Environmental benefits as well as economic and social benefits can be substantially achieved through the implementation of the new mode. The results show that carbon emissions can be reduced by 23.79–28.49% for the end of the distribution, 16.27–16.35% for the front-end, and approximately 17% for the entire distribution. Additionally, the loading rate of vans for the front-end of the distribution can be improved by 15.77%.

Continuous participation intention in on-demand logistics: interactive effects of order assignment and delivery-related information disclosure strategies

“…To the best of our knowledge there is no literature investigating the influence of strategy on couriers' order-receiving justice demand and delivery-related information demand. Considering the direct demand of orders for couriers, order delivery directly depends on order assignment and information disclosure strategy (Li and Cai, 2020; Bi et al. , 2020), and this paper investigates the influence of order assignment strategy and delivery-related information disclosure strategy on couriers' justice perception and continuous participation intention.…”

“…(2018) investigated the improvement of platform resource utilization and customer experience from order matching strategy in taxi-hailing platforms. In on-demand logistics, orders are the most important resource for couriers, and orders being received and completed depends on order assignment and information disclosure strategy (Li and Cai, 2020; Bi et al. , 2020), and relevant studies found the significant influence order assignment and information disclosure strategy had on platform operational efficiency separately.…”

“…Xu et al (2021) studied the impact of information disclosure strategy on customers trust and purchase intention in accommodation-sharing platforms, while Yang et al (2021) explored the influence of evaluation and feedback strategy on solvers participation in competitive crowdsourcing platforms, and Xu et al (2018) investigated the improvement of platform resource utilization and customer experience from order matching strategy in taxi-hailing platforms. In ondemand logistics, orders are the most important resource for couriers, and orders being received and completed depends on order assignment and information disclosure strategy (Li and Cai, 2020;Bi et al, 2020), and relevant studies found the significant influence order assignment and information disclosure strategy had on platform operational efficiency separately. Sun et al (2020) investigated the influence of different order assignment strategies on platform matching efficiency, and Dai et al (2020) investigated information regarding orders, delivery capacity and traffic to improve the efficiency of order completion.…”

Can Innovation Agglomeration Reduce Carbon Emissions? Evidence from China

“…With the improvement of income level and the enhancement of environmental awareness, technological innovation not only plays a role in economic development, but also takes environmental protection into account [ 11 , 12 ]. Especially, low-carbon technological innovation is of great significance to carbon emission reduction [ 13 ]. (2) The driving factors of carbon emissions was explored by the IPAT equation and STIRPAT model [ 14 ].…”

Hybrid Henry Gas Solubility Optimization: An Effective Algorithm for Fuel Consumption Vehicle Routing Problem

“…One sector that triggers this problem is the logistics sector (Ibrahim et al, 2020;. Recently, researchers proposed green logistics to overcome this problem (Helo & Ala-Harja, 2018;Bi et al, 2020).…”