Geographic features of zero-emissions urban mobility: the case of electric buses in Europe and Belarus

This article reviews the emerging phenomena of electric buses’ deployment in Europe and Belarus within the general framework of the concept of sustainable and electric urban mobility. The author offers a brief overview of electric bus technologies available on the market and a spatial analysis of fleet deployment in Europe. The analysis of the spatial structure of the distribution of e-buses in Europe indicated that, in terms of the number of vehicles in operation, the UK and the Netherlands are the regional leaders, while in terms of the number of cities testing e-buses – Germany, Sweden, and Poland are the leaders. The analysis showed that the main factors supporting the distribution of innovative technology and public support are legislative and regulative framework as well as clear strategic planning and cooperation between local administrations and transportation authorities. Other important aspects, such as network building features, and the location of the charging infrastructure were also discussed. The analysis of the case study of Minsk (the first city to introduce electric buses in Belarus) outlined the typical limiting factors for all types of markets: high battery costs and dependency on infrastructure; recommendations are given to emphasise bus fleet replacement (instead of trolleybus) and to develop a comprehensive sustainable urban mobility strategy

Production distribution planning in a multiechelon supply chain using carbon policies: A review and reflections

Sustainability of a supply chain has gained more attention from economists, environmentalists, consumers, manufacturers, government and the academia. In this paper, the literature survey has been performed on production allocation problem in a multi-echelon supply chain with carbon policies. With web-based search engines such as Scopus and Web of Science several resources such as journals, conference proceedings and books are selected and reviewed. It is observed from the literature that the mentioned problem traces the progression of carbon policies in a supply chain over the past 22 years to provide substantiation for Green Supply Chain. The research papers are then analyzed and categorized to construct the useful foundation of previous studies. Moreover, the importance of this problem in recent years needs has been highlighted by mentioning the gaps in the literature. Further, at the end of the paper, several future work directions in this area also suggested.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The design of green supply chains under carbon policies: A literature review of quantitative models

Carbon footprinting of products and services is getting increasing attention due to the growing emphasis on carbon related policies in many countries. As a result, many enterprises are focusing on the design of green supply chains (GSCs) with research on supply chains (SCs) focused not only on cost efficiency, but also on its environmental consequences. The review presented in this paper focuses on the implications of carbon policies on SCs. The concept of content analysis is used to retrieve and analyze the information regarding drivers (carbon policies), actors (for example, manufacturers and retailers), methodologies (mathematical modeling techniques), decision-making contexts (such as, facility location and order quantity), and emission reduction opportunities. The review shows a lack of emissions analysis of SCs that face carbon policies in different countries. The research also focuses on the design of carbon policies for emissions reduction in different operating situations. Some possible research directions are also discussed at the end of this review.A NPRP award NPRP No.5-1284-5-198 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation).Scopu

On two-echelon inventory systems with Poisson demand and lost sales

We derive approximations for the service levels of two-echelon inventory systems with lost sales and Poisson demand. Our method is simple and accurate for a very broad range of problem instances, including cases with both high and low service levels. In contrast, existing methods only perform well for limited problem settings, or under restrictive assumptions.\u

A GRASPxELS for Scheduling of Job-Shop Like Manufacturing Systems and CO2 Emission Reduction

Part 1: Knowledge-Based SustainabilityInternational audienceThe issue of reducing CO2 emission and associated carbon footprint consumption for manufacturing scheduling is addressed. We focus our attention on a job-shop environment where machines can work at different speeds and therefore different energies consumed, i.e. CO2 emissions. It represents an extension of the classical job-shop scheduling problem, where each operation has to be executed by one machine and this machine can work at different speeds, problem which has been introduced by [1]. Energy-efficient scheduling of such type of manufacturing systems demands an optimization approach whose dual objectives are to minimize both the CO2 emissions and the makespan. To solve this new problem, a GRASPxELS is developed. New instances benchmark based on well know Laurence’s instances are introduced and numerical experiments are proposed trying to evaluate the method convergence. The performance is evaluated using the optimal solutions found after a strongly time consuming resolution based on a linear formulation of the problem

Electricity and Fuel Consumption in a Lean Energy Supply Chain

Human activities are the main sources of environmental pollution. Awareness about this fact, motivated us to make changes in different paradigms of our lives including industrial or personal activities. Environmental activities assumed to have conflict with financial objectives, in this study we try to align business requirements with environmental concerns. Among all human activities, generating energy has the most negative impact on the environment. The major part of the generated energy will be consumed in transportation and industrial demand which makes them the most effective targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emission. In a lean environment, small batch sizes increase the number of set-ups and consequently, energy consumption in manufacturing. On the other hand, small batch sizes increase the delivery rates and complexity of transportation. Therefore, the focus of this study will be on reducing the environmental impact of human activities in transportation and industrial loads as a part of lean supply chain. The focus in transportation will be on trucking with gasoline or diesel as the source of energy. In industrial loads, the emerging opportunities after deregulation of the electricity market and incentive programs toward cleaner productions encouraged us to focus on electrical demand in the industry. Despite motivations for reducing emissions in supply chain management, lack of knowledge and expertise in measuring, modeling and optimizing energy consumption is a barrier in production section. In this dissertation, a framework of a power measurement and simulation will be introduced. In the next section, a production planning model incorporating energy will be developed considering different states of electricity consumption (idle, startup, etc.). As the next segment of the supply chain, a method for optimal carrier selection and routing will be developed and tested based on real world data. This model can use the advantage of geographically distributed carriers while utilizing private fleet at an acceptable level. Based on the insight developed in transportation and industrial loads, an experience based performance measure will be developed to quantify the performance and associated energy consumption in the supply chain