Enhancing logistics operations sustainability through resource sharing: The case of French agri-food SMEs

In recent years, the implementation of collaborative strategy in logistics systems has become a highly efficient practice to realize economic as well as environmental benefits. Traditionally, the collaborative logistics network design problem is based on classical and independent models where each planning decision is made separately. This study presents and solves an integrated and collaborative two-echelon location, inventory and routing problem to design sustainable distribution networks. Due to the NP-hard nature of the investigated problem, a two-stage heuristic approach is developed to deal with large real-world problems. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, a comparative study of the obtained results with those obtained by the CPLEX solver is performed. The comparison results demonstrate that the heuristic approach is very efficient in terms of computation time and solution quality. In addition, a real case study in the French agri-food sector is discussed to analyze the sustainable gains of the proposed approach. The findings reveal that cooperation in integrated decision management can significantly reduce emissions, accident risk as well as logistics costs.