Combining Facility Location and Routing Decisions in Sustainable Urban Freight Distribution under Horizontal Collaboration: How Can Shippers Be Benefited?

Abstract

This article investigates the potential economic, environmental, and social effects of combining depot location and vehicle routing decisions in urban road freight transportation under horizontal collaboration. We consider a city in which several suppliers decide to joint deliveries to their customers and goods are delivered via intermediate depots. We study a transportation optimization problem from the perspective of sustainability development. This quantitative approach is based on three-objective mathematical model for strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making as a two-echelon location routing problem (2E-LRP). The objectives are to minimize cost and CO2 emissions of the transportation and maximize the created job opportunities. The model was solved with the ε-constraint method using extended known instances reflecting the real distribution in urban area to evaluate several goods’ delivery strategies. The obtained results by comparing collaborative and noncollaborative scenarios show that collaboration leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions, transportation cost, used vehicles, and travelled distances in addition to the improvement of the vehicles load rate but collaboration affects negatively social impact. To evaluate the effect of the method used to allocate the total gains to the different partners, we suggest to decision makers a comparison between well-known allocation methods.

Cooperative game‐theoretic features of cost sharing in location‐routing

“…Despite the growing interest in both collaborative transportation and location-routing, the integration of these two areas remains fairly unattended by researchers. The only exceptions, to our knowledge, are van Oost (2016), Quintero-Araujo et al 2019, and Ouhader and Kyal (2017), which present promising studies on the benefits of collaboration in location-routing. Besides the academic interest, the intersection of these two areas is motivated from practical situations, such as the installation of urban consolidation centers for city logistics and the formation of strategic alliances.…”

Shared Mechanism-Based Self-Adaptive Hyperheuristic for Regional Low-Carbon Location-Routing Problem with Time Windows

“…Problem Domain Review. LRP deals with the combination of two types NP-hard decisions that often emerge in logistics: the location-allocation problem (LAP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP) (Ouhader and Kyal) [8] (Sun) [9]. Among the applications of LRP, LRP considering environmental effect such as carbon emission/fuel consumption, namely, LCLRP, has recently emerged as one of the most addressed, which also handles two NP-hard problems: LAP and pollution-routing problem (PRP) (Bektas and Laporte) [10] or green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) (Liu et al) [11].…”

“…Constraint (7) makes sure that each client is visited only once by a single vehicle. Constraint (8) guarantees that the number of edges entering and leaving each node is the same. Constraints (9) and (10) demonstrate that each client is serviced only once by a single depot and vehicle.…”

Assessing the economic and environmental benefits of horizontal cooperation in delivery: Performance and scenario analysis

“…This problem was modeled as a Two Echelons Location Routing Problem (2E-LRP) in our previous work (Ouhader & El kyal, 2017) where we studied the economic, ecologic and social impacts of joining facility location and vehicle routing problems in urban road freight transportation under horizontal collaboration. The problem was mostly analyzed under single-objective approach and trade-offs between the three metrics was presented.…”