Assessing the economic and environmental benefits of horizontal cooperation in delivery: Performance and scenario analysis

Abstract

The growing environmental and economic concerns oblige logistics operations managers to look for simple solutions to optimize their processes and to corporate sustainability in logistics networks. Logistics collaboration is one of the management practices to foster the sustainability of freight transport. This paper presents an ‘ex ante’ decision support tool to evaluate the economic and ecologic impacts of shippers’ horizontal collaboration in urban freight delivery. Optimization model as a two-echelon location routing problem (2E-LRP) is exploited to demonstrate the benefits of joining facility location and vehicle routing decisions under multi-objective optimization approach. Numerical instances reproducing the real urban network are regenerated to test the proposed mechanism. Scenario analysis is conducted to analyze and discuss the effect of parameters’ changes in generated gains.