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Sustainable Logistics and Transportation Systems: Integrating Optimization and Simulation Analysis to Enhance Strategic Supply Chain Decision-Making

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Innovative Logistics Services and Sustainable Lifestyles

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Abstract

The design of logistics and transportation systems has long-term effects on the sustainability performance of the supply chain and its operational costs. Competing objectives coupled with deep uncertainty involved in the decision-making problem make it inherently challenging. While optimizing facility locations under certain conditions has been extensively studied in the literature, however, deterministic insights for strategic decision-making are not necessarily determining the best choice. Strategic decision-making is also concerned with exploring the plethora of possible future options arising from plausible choices and exogenous factors. Therefore, this study aims to integrate optimization methods commonly used in operations research with simulation techniques to enhance strategic supply chain decision-making. Optimization approaches are accordingly used as the evaluation of simulated scenarios. While various objectives are explored and embedded in an optimization model, the ultimate purpose of this study is “exploring” the landscape of plausible outcomes and their relationships with decisions. The proposed method is applied to a concrete setting, in particular an adapted case study of a small-scale, local food cooperation in Austria, to evaluate the number of distribution centers in this decentralized food production and distribution network.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Witten/Herdecke University, Centre for Sustainable Corporate Leadership, Witten, Germany

    Tim Gruchmann

  2. Centre for Logistics and Traffic, Joint Centre Urban Systems, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Jan Eiten, Gustavo De La Torre & Ani Melkonyan

Authors
  1. Tim Gruchmann
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  2. Jan Eiten
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  3. Gustavo De La Torre
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  4. Ani Melkonyan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tim Gruchmann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Logistics and Traffic Joint Centre Urban Systems, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Ani Melkonyan

  2. Centre for Logistics and Traffic Joint Centre Urban Systems, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Klaus Krumme

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Gruchmann, T., Eiten, J., De La Torre, G., Melkonyan, A. (2019). Sustainable Logistics and Transportation Systems: Integrating Optimization and Simulation Analysis to Enhance Strategic Supply Chain Decision-Making. In: Melkonyan, A., Krumme, K. (eds) Innovative Logistics Services and Sustainable Lifestyles. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98467-4_12

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