Abstract
In this article, the p-median model is used to find the location of retail stores that minimizes CO2 emissions from consumer travel. The optimal location is then compared with the existing retail location, and the excess CO2 emissions compared with the optimal solution is calculated. The results show that by using the environmentally optimal location, CO2 emissions from consumer travel could be reduced by approximately 22%.
Acknowledgement
The financial support received from the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1 Jia et al. (Citation2013) found, in a study of consumers’ travel to a shopping centre, that the consumers generally opted for the shortest route.
2 The road distance serves as a proxy for the CO2 emissions. Määttä-Juntunen et al. (Citation2011) elaborate on more refined proxies for the CO2 emissions derived from the road distance. Primarily, these are based on highway and urban roads with two different average speeds. In addition, in Carling et al. (Citation2013), a detailed approach for measuring CO2 emissions was found to be strongly correlated with the travelling distance, once outside the inner-city area. Consequently, we have not attempted to refine the measure of CO2 emissions further as this study is conducted in a rural area with a national road network with little variation in road types, average speed and traffic flow.
3 Our adaptive scheme to dynamically adjust temperature works as follows: after n = 10 iterations with no improvement, the temperature is increased according to newtemp = temp * 3 ^ β, where β starts at 0.5 and is increased by 0.5 each time the system is reheated. As a result, the SA will never be in a frozen state for long. The temperature decreases each iteration with a factor of 0.95. The aforementioned settings are a result of substantial preliminary testing on these data and problem.