Sustainable city logistics planning under collaboration

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Sustainable city logistics planning is vital to minimize the negative impacts of freight movements on quality of community life and environment in urban areas. Several sustainable freight initiatives have been put by municipal administrations in this direction such as vehicle sizing, access ">Although these initiatives are aimed to minimize negative environmental impacts of urban goods movement yet they can often negatively impact the operational efficiency of logistics operators. For example, limiting the size of delivery vehicles inside urban areas causes increased number of delivery trips by small vehicles which can be more polluting and costly to logistics operators. In face of these sustainability initiatives and limited resources, city logistics operators may enter into collaboration with other logistics operators to minimize distribution costs under the sustainability regulations imposed by municipal administrators in urban areas. In this research program, we address the problem of sustainable city logistics planning under collaboration. Our goal is to develop efficient solution approaches for collaboration planning of logistics operators, design sustainable distribution networks under collaboration, and propose models for collaborative goods distribution to achieve sustainability objectives. Since these are complex combinatorial optimization problems, mathematical programming and meta-heuristics based solution approaches will be used. Models validation will be performed using benchmarking data sets available in literature. Under lack of data, model validation will be done using simulated data sets generated at random and the obtained results will be compared against other standard approaches.Both from research and practical perspective, the proposed research has significant influence in providing an understanding of how sustainable city logistics planning can be performed under collaboration. The results can be used by logistics operators in designing sustainable goods delivery networks and developing sustainable goods distribution strategies under collaboration. The results of the study can also be used by policy makers and city administrators in developing new policies considering the delivery constraints of logistics operators. Collaboration between logistics operators will minimize vehicle trips and empty vehicle movements which will also lead to less congestion, air pollution and noise, thereby improving the quality of life in urban areas.The study will train six highly qualified personnel (3 PhD, 3 MASc) in the area of sustainable city logistics planning to build competitive advantage of Canada in this area of research. The research results will be disseminated through good quality conferences and journals to contribute to the advancement of research in the proposed area.