Green Facility Location – A Case Study

“Green logistics” is a popular catchword, not only in public and among companies, but also in academia. In this paper we apply the concept of green logistics to the facility location problem: Optimizing the locations of facilities in the general p-median model. This is based on CO2 emissions generated through transportation rather than traditional cost measures, such as physical transportation cost. We examine the results of a real world case study and compare those with each other. Especially implications for real world application are critically discussed

The Position-Aware-Market: Optimizing Freight Delivery for Less-Than-Truckload Transportation

The increasing competition faced by logistics carriers requires them to ship at lower cost and higher efficiency. In reality, however, many trucks are running empty or with a partial load. Bridging such residual capacity with real time transportation demand enhances the efficiency of the carriers. We therefore introduce the Position-Aware-Market (PAM), where transportation requests are traded in real time to utilize transportation capacities optimally. In this paper we mainly focus on the decision support system for the truck driver, which solves a profit- maximizing Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PM-PDPTW). We propose a novel Recursive Branch-and-Bound algorithm that solves the problem optimally, and apply it to a Tabu-Search heuristic for larger problem instances. Simulations show that problems with up to 50 requests can be solved optimally within seconds. Larger problems with 200 requests can be solved approximately by Tabu-Search in seconds, retaining 60% of the optimal profit