A sustainable approach for a collaborative distribution network

Abstract

Sustainability has recently become a challenge for many industrial and commercial companies. However, it has become important for them to understand how sustainability performance balances with their competitive priorities. In this paper, horizontal collaboration is presented as a powerful solution to achieve this objective. It focuses on the collaborative distribution network design problem to optimize the freight transport from suppliers to customers located in the urban area. To address this problem, a mixed integer linear programming is proposed. It takes into account four dimensions of sustainability. The economic and environmental dimensions aim respectively at reducing the logistics costs and the CO2 emissions form vehicles and hubs. The social dimension aims at maximizing the created job opportunities and assessing the accident risk and the noise level. The institutional dimension is ensured by the constraints of the regulation relative to the access of vehicles according to weight and schedule. The optimization of the model is performed in a single and multi-objective way by applying the weighted sum method. Several numerical examples are carried out based on a case study of an agri-food distribution network located in Tunisia to validate the proposed model. Finally, some managerial implications are concluded.

Keywords

• Horizontal collaboration
• Sustainability
• Freight transport
• Distribution network design problem