A novel bi-objective model of cold chain logistics considering location-routing decision and environmental effects

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 9;15(4):e0230867. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230867. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Economic, environmental, and social effects are the most dominating issues in cold chain logistics. The goal of this paper is to propose a cost-saving, energy-saving, and emission-reducing bi-objective model for the cold chain-based low-carbon location-routing problem. In the proposed model, the first objective (economic and environmental effects) is to minimize the total logistics costs consisting of costs of depots to open, renting vehicles, fuel consumption, and carbon emission, and the second one (social effect) is to reduce the damage of cargos, which could improve the client satisfaction. In the proposed model, a strategy is developed to meet the requirements of clients as to the demands on the types of cargos, that is, general cargos, refrigerated cargos, and frozen cargos. Since the proposed problem is NP-hard, we proposed a simple and efficient framework combining seven well-known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Furthermore, in the experiments, we first examined the effectiveness of the proposed framework by assessing the performance of seven MOEAs, and also verified the efficiency of the proposed model. Extensive experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of the proposed strategy and variants on depot capacity, hard time windows, and fleet composition on the performance indicators of Pareto fronts and cold chain logistics networks, such as fuel consumption, carbon emission, travel distance, travel time, and the total waiting time of vehicles.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Carbon / economics
  • Climate Change
  • Costs and Cost Analysis
  • Environment*
  • Greenhouse Gases*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Motor Vehicles* / economics
  • Time Factors
  • Vehicle Emissions

Substances

  • Greenhouse Gases
  • Vehicle Emissions
  • Carbon

Grants and funding

This work was funded by as follows: (1) the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant numbers 61572438, https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-list Yanwei Zhao (2) the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant numbers 61873240, https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-list Wanliang Wang (3) the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant numbers 61402409, https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-list Jingling Zhang (4) Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang grant number LY19F030052, Jingling Zhang (5) Science Technology plan project of Zhejiang grant number 2017C33224, Chunmiao Zhang (6) the open fund of the key laboratory for metallurgical equipment and control of the ministry of education in Wuhan University of Science and Technology 2017B04. Gongfa Li Conceptualization: Longlong Leng, Yanwei Zhao. Data curation: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang. Formal analysis: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang. Funding acquisition: Wanliang Wang, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang, Yanwei Zhao, Gongfa Li. Investigation: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang. Methodology: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang, Wanliang Wang. Supervision: Yanwei Zhao, Wanliang Wang, Gongfa Li. Validation: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang. Writing – original draft: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang. Writing – review & editing: Longlong Leng, Chunmiao Zhang, Jingling Zhang.