Abstract
Inefficient road transportation causes unnecessary costs and polluting emissions. This problem is even more severe in refrigerated transportation, in which temperature control is used to guarantee the quality of the products. Organizing logistics cooperatively can help decrease both the environmental and the economic impacts. In Joint Route Planning (JRP) cooperation, suppliers and customers jointly optimize routing decisions so that cost and emissions are minimized. Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) cooperation extends JRP cooperation by optimizing routing and inventory planning decisions simultaneously. However, in addition to their economic advantages, VMI and JRP may also yield environmental benefits. To test this assertion, we perform a case study on cooperation between a number of supermarket chains in the Netherlands. The data of this case study are analyzed to quantify both the economic and environmental benefits of implementing cooperation via JRP and VMI, using vehicle routing and an inventory routing models. We found that JRP cooperation can substantially reduce cost and emissions compared with uncooperative routing. In addition, VMI cooperation can further reduce cost and emissions, but minimizing cost and minimizing emissions no longer result in the same solution and there is a trade-off to be made.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 178-193 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment |
Volume | 65 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2018 |
Funding
This work is part of the research programme CapsLog, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under grant 2015-01689 . This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.
Keywords
- CO emissions
- Fresh food
- Inventory
- Logistics
- Route optimization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Transportation
- General Environmental Science