Green collaborative transport planning model with time windows: A case study in food retailing

Food supply chains generate a significant portion of CO2 emissions, because of the large volume of food transportation and the large number and frequency of trips made to deliver food products to the retailing stores, making it available to the customers. Collaboration of partners in food supply chains will lead to reducing CO2 emissions. Such collaboration could be in form of sharing trucks by retailers, in order to increase fill rate of the vehicles and to reduce their empty running. This paper presents a formulation for a green collaborative transport planning model with time windows. A case study is carried out in order to measure the reduced travelled distance for delivery of products and the reduced amount of CO2 emissions, as a result of implementing collaborative distribution. The numericalcontribution of the paper is important for showing the role of collaborative distribution for developing green supply chain management and illustratedby anapplication to a real case of logistics and product delivery.