The pooling of sustainable freight transport

Abstract

Logistics pooling presents a very important solution for companies to improve the different aspects of sustainability. The objective of this study is to propose a mathematical approach to the pooling of sustainable freight transport. In this work, the pooling performance is evaluated at different levels of sustainability. The proposed MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) consists of designing a shared logistics chain, taking into account economic and environmental objectives, namely the different logistics cost and the different CO₂ emissions. The social/societal level, namely the accident rates and the noise level are assessed after model resolving. Also, the transportation fill rate is calculated. Finally, we demonstrated the pooling performance with an illustrative example of freight transport, which is made up of four suppliers who collaborate to deliver six common distribution centers. Firstly, we solve the mathematical model by the mono-objective functions (economic or environmental). Secondly, we solved the model with a multi-objective function, which combines the two objectives (economic and environmental) with the Ɛ-Constraint method.

Keywords:

• Pooling
• sustainability
• freight transport
• mathematical approach
• MILP
• multi-objective optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.