Title: A decision-making mechanism considering carbon footprint and cost to fulfil orders for multi-site global companies

Authors: Rong-Chang Chen; Ting-Ting Hu

Addresses: Department of Distribution Management, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, No. 129, Sec. 3, Sanmin Rd., Taichung 404, Taiwan ' Department of Distribution Management, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, No. 129, Sec. 3, Sanmin Rd., Taichung 404, Taiwan

Abstract: As global warming becomes increasingly serious, some proper measures should be taken to avoid the possible devastating effects. To address this issue, corporations may take CO₂ emission into consideration when they are engaged in operations planning. In this study, we attempt to optimise order fulfilment which considers carbon footprint as well as cost as objectives for global companies with multiple manufacturing sites. A two-phased decision-making mechanism is adopted: in the first phase, inappropriate manufacturing sites are manually excluded to reduce computation time; in the second phase, multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is employed to find solutions which illustrate the interactions between total carbon footprint and total cost. In order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach, this study performs a variety of experiments partly based on real data from a famous global company in Taiwan. The research findings show that the proposed mechanism can obtain feasible solutions effectively and efficiently. When the site number increases, the total carbon footprint decreases, and influences the environment positively.

Keywords: carbon footprint; order fulfilment; low-carbon logistics; decision making; order fulfilment costs; multi-site global companies; global warming; CO2; carbon emissions; carbon dioxide; multi-objective genetic algorithms; MOGA; Taiwan; environmental impact.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2015.069121

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2015 Vol.7 No.3, pp.295 - 318

Received: 03 Mar 2013
Accepted: 27 Mar 2014
Published online: 29 Apr 2015 *

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