Sustainable Logistics Network Design for Delivery Operations with Time Horizons in B2B E-Commerce Platform

Dhirendra Prajapati, M. Manoj Kumar, Saurabh Pratap, H. Chelladurai and Mohd Zuhair
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Dhirendra Prajapati: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur 482005, India
M. Manoj Kumar: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur 482005, India
Saurabh Pratap: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi 221005, India
H. Chelladurai: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur 482005, India
Mohd Zuhair: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmedabad 382481, India

Logistics, 2021, vol. 5, issue 3, 1-13

Abstract: In the recent era, the rapidly increasing trend of e-commerce business creates opportunities for logistics service providers to grow globally. With this growth, the concern regarding the implementation of sustainability in logistic networks has received attention in recent years. Thus, in this work, we have focused on the vehicle routing problem (VRP) to deliver the products in a lesser time horizon with driver safety concern considerations in business (B2B) e-commerce platforms. We proposed a sustainable logistics network that captures the complexities of suppliers, retailers, and logistics service providers. A mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) approach is applied to formulate a model to minimize total time associated with order processing, handling, packaging, shipping, and vehicle maintenance. Branch-and-bound algorithms in the LINGO optimization tool and genetic algorithm (GA) are used to solve the formulated mathematical model. The computational experiments are performed in eight different case scenarios (small-sized problem to large-sized problem) to validate the model.

Keywords: B2B e-commerce logistics; VRP; time horizons; sustainability; exact optimization; metaheuristic approaches (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L8 L80 L81 L86 L87 L9 L90 L91 L92 L93 L98 L99 M1 M10 M11 M16 M19 R4 R40 R41 R49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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