The Impact of Collaborative Scheduling and Routing for Interconnected Logistics: A European Case Study

Interconnected logistics system can play an important role towards having a more sustainable green freight transport. Recently, after introducing the concept of Physical Internet (PI), researchers have started to explore the opportunities and challenges that a collaborative and interconnected network could create in different aspects of the supply chain. In this research, we study the last mile delivery as well as vehicle dispatching problems under the assumptions of collaborative supply chain networks while assuming that modularized boxes are applied inside the network from the provider to the final customer. Our research aims at proposing a more efficient resource planning with the minimal number of empty vehicle movements running on roads that ultimately leads to decrease carbon dioxide emission. The assumptions have been tested and verified using real data coming from a major retail company in Europe.