Title: Sustainable supply chain by intermodal itinerary planning: a multiobjective ant colony approach

Authors: Marie Sawadogo; Didier Anciaux

Addresses: Université de Lorraine, Ile du Saulcy, 57045 Metz Cedex 01, France. ' Université de Lorraine, Ile du Saulcy, 57045 Metz Cedex 01, France

Abstract: The supply chain has entered a new age where the environmental and societal challenges concern policy makers and people affected by logistic activities. This paper addresses the taking into account of environmental and societal impacts for decision making in sustainable supply chain. The present contribution is about building a sustainable transportation system; our solution for impacts abatement in the supply chain is by intermodal itinerary planning. A mathematical model is proposed to compute and analyse the economic gain of an ecological strategy in supply chain. A multiobjective shortest path approach is then proposed and an ant colony algorithm is built in order to find Pareto-optimal paths aiming at proposing the choice a sustainable path without sacrificing economical objectives. The theoretical findings are applied to a case of transportation in Europe and the obtained solutions are analysed. The model saw that this tool can be use for tactical planning within sustainable transportation systems.

Keywords: intermodal transportation; sustainable development; modelling; multiobjective optimisation; multiobjective shortest path; green supply chains; ant colony optimisation; ACO; sustainable supply chains; itinerary planning; supply chain sustainability; sustainable transport.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2012.047654

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2012 Vol.5 No.3, pp.235 - 266

Received: 01 Jul 2011
Accepted: 26 Jan 2012
Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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