An innovative decision-making framework for evaluating transportation service providers based on sustainable criteria

Evaluating transportation service providers is an applied and multi-criteria decision-making problem. To ensure supply chain sustainability, it is important to consider all sustainable criteria for assessing and evaluating transport service providers. This paper aims to develop a new decision-making framework to evaluate transport service providers considering sustainable criteria from economic, environmental, social and operational aspects. The decision-making framework integrates both qualitative expert opinion and quantitative best-worst method (BWM) and VIsekriterijumska optimizacija i KOmpromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method. The developed framework contributes to the academic literature by expanding the knowledge in supply chain sustainability by considering all possible sustainable criteria and integrating both qualitative and quantitative methods for evaluating transport service providers. This study also contributes to practice by developing a decision support tool, by which decision-makers can make an accurate, systematic and prompt decision to identify and assess sustainable criteria and to evaluate the priority of different transport service providers.</p

A recovery planning model for online business operations under the COVID-19 outbreak

This study analytically develops a new recovery planning optimisation model for managing the impacts of the recent COVID-19 outbreak for online business operations. Firstly, a mathematical model for the ideal plan is designed and then extended to generate a recovery plan in a finite planning horizon that maximises total profit. Recovery plans are generated considering two scenarios, namely the dynamic and uncertain situations. For the dynamic situation, a realistic system with time-dependent and dynamic demand, supply, and warehouse capacity for investigating the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak is developed using several measures, such as collaborating with emergency suppliers, increasing warehouse capacity, and considering back-orders and lost sales to form recovery strategies. For the uncertain situation, demand, supply, and warehouse capacities are considered as uncertain variables. Further, an innovative solution approach using an adapted differential evolution technique, which is capable of (i) generating long-term recovery plans and (ii) solving both small- and large-scale problems, is developed. The results are illustrated using numerical analyses and simulation experiments. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted. In practice, the proposed optimisation model will assist the decision-makers of online business operations facing the COVID-19 outbreak to decide the optimal recovery plans.</p