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In the digital era, third-party food delivery operations are very popular all around the world. However, to achieve a sustainable operation for food delivery businesses is a challenging issue. Motivated by the fact that there is a lack of consolidated view towards the topic in the literature, we conduct a systematic literature review to identify how to achieve a sustainable operation for third-party food delivery and highlight the recent advances in this important area with the discussion of real-world practices. In this study, first, we review the relevant literature and apply the triple bottom line (TBL) framework to classify prior studies into economic sustainability, social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and multi-dimensional sustainability. We then identify three major research gaps, including inadequate investigation on the restaurant’s preferences and decisions, superficial understanding on the environmental performance, and limited examination on the multi-dimensional sustainability in the third-party food delivery operations. Finally, based on the reviewed literature and observed industrial practices, we propose five future areas that deserve an in-depth further investigation. They are namely applications of digital technologies, behaviors and decisions of the restaurants, risk management, TBL, and post-coronavirus pandemic.

This article considers supply chain competition in which two symmetric manufacturers compete in both the new and remanufactured products markets. To engage in remanufacturing, the two competing manufacturers must appropriately determine their remanufacturing capability and design new products to facilitate their competition in remanufacturing. This inevitably changes the competing manufacturers’ cost structure in terms of both fixed and variable costs. The problem is formulated as a two-stage game. Therein, the competing manufacturers first determine whether to invest in remanufacturing, followed by determining the production quantities of new and remanufactured products if they decide to invest in remanufacturing. Our analytical results reveal that the equilibria associated with the three scenarios in which both manufacturers invest, neither manufacturer invests, and either manufacturer invests can be conditionally achieved, depending on the fixed cost incurred in developing remanufacturing capability and the difference between marginal costs associated with new and remanufactured products. Furthermore, it is found that despite the cost structure changes, remanufacturing investment can expand the two competing manufacturers’ market shares and outweigh the cannibalization effect between new and remanufactured products, resulting in higher profits. Nevertheless, the competing manufacturers may be trapped in a prisoner's dilemma when they both invest in remanufacturing operations. By comparing the environmental impact with and without remanufacturing investment, the result suggests that remanufacturing investment may not be environmental friendly, especially when the cost difference between new and remanufactured products is significant. Finally, the subsidy policy is proven to benefit manufacturers in gaining more profits and promoting the development of the remanufacturing industry, but may cause an unanticipated negative overall outcome on the environment.

This article investigates the impact of intercompetitor licensing between an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and an independent remanufacturer (IR) on market competition between new and remanufactured products, the IR's remanufacturing strategy, and the IR's optimal quality choice for remanufactured products. In the considered supply chain, the OEM sells new products, and the IR collects used products and then sells remanufactured products to compete with the OEM. To produce remanufactured products, the IR can acquire remanufacturing technology either by paying a licensing fee to the OEM or self-developing it in-house by incurring a fixed research and development cost. We develop game-theoretic models to determine the optimal supply chain decisions concerning the royalty licensing fee, IR's remanufacturing strategy and production quality, and product sale prices. We find that a licensing contract will always induce the OEM and the IR to increase their sales price for new and remanufactured products. However, the OEM will always increase the sales price for new products to a larger degree than that of the IR. This can alleviate price competition between new and remanufactured products and make remanufactured products more competitive in the market. Under licensing cooperation, the IR will always remanufacture used products to a higher quality level that will intensify quality competition. No matter whether the royalty fee is exogenously or endogenously determined by the OEM, there exists a wide range of parameter regions such that a licensing contract will produce a win-win solution for the OEM and the IR. A licensing cooperation may be reached even when the unit royalty fee is at a relatively low level and the total royalty fee is higher than the self-development option.

This article aims to address the issue of international sustainable supply chain management under bilateral governments’ policy intervention. The dynamic and stochastic features of bilateral governments’ policy, focusing on collaboration and power asymmetry, are analytically considered. Specifically, various cross-governmental interaction factors, such as green investment efforts, interaction externalities, and political power asymmetry, are characterized and examined in the proposed theoretical model. Accordingly, a multimethodological approach using a two-stage game-theoretic analytical model is developed, where the decision dynamics of cross-governmental cooperation are investigated at the first stage, and its influence on sustainable supply chain management (in both countries) is explored at the second stage. Anecdotal evidence and applicability of the proposed model are illustrated via an empirical study using multiple-data sources. We show that governmental decisions for bilateral cooperation are significantly related to the bilateral interaction factors such as green investment efforts and less likely to be affected by the power asymmetry in the long run. Furthermore, we find that cooperative bilateral policy intervention favors not only the enhancement of bilateral social welfare (the government level) but also the sustainability of international supply chains (the firm level).

This study considers a supply chain consisting of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and a contract manufacturer (CM). The OEM outsources the production of new products to the CM and cooperates with the CM again in remanufacturing. However, the cooperation in remanufacturing may be either through outsourcing or authorization. As the remanufacturer, the CM may choose among three remanufacturing strategies (i.e., not remanufacturing, partial remanufacturing, and full remanufacturing) based on the quality of the collected products. We examined the CM's optimal remanufacturing strategy decision for a given remanufacturing mode (i.e., outsourcing or authorization), the OEM's remanufacturing mode decision when the CM's remanufacturing strategy has been determined, and the environmental impact of the two remanufacturing modes. The results show that, depending on the profitability of new and remanufactured products, the CM will adopt different remanufacturing strategies in the two remanufacturing modes, and not remanufacturing may become an optimal choice for the CM in the authorization mode. For the OEM, both remanufacturing modes can give the OEM a higher profit when certain market conditions are reached, whereas the CM's profit in the outsourcing mode is always larger than that in the authorization mode. As such, outsourcing can become a win-win solution for the OEM and CM. Both remanufacturing modes can achieve the best possible environmental outcome when the full remanufacturing strategy is adopted. However, outsourcing remanufacturing is always more environmentally friendly than the authorization mode in the partial remanufacturing scenario.

We address how to manage extended supply chains that lie beyond the first-tier suppliers. The first-tier suppliers have their suppliers who provide them with goods or services. While lower-tier suppliers are often not an explicit concern of the focal firm, the firm's performance not only depends on the performance of its first-tier suppliers, but also on the performance of their suppliers and beyond. These lower-tier suppliers are much less visible and may not even be known to the focal firm. Our intention is to bring awareness to the importance of these lower-tier suppliers and capture possible strategies that buying companies may pursue to manage them. Extended supply chains are complex and involve evolving relationships between various buyers and suppliers that are located along different tiers of the chain and across different parts of the globe. We address several topic areas and suggest emerging research focuses that should be considered in coming years. (Less)

The efficiency of emergency responses is at the heart of post-disaster rescue routing problems. Previous rescue models address the efficiency issue primarily by minimizing the total travel time, while not taking into account other significant factors in the rescue process, such as the number of affected people and the degree of building damage. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper aims to solve the rescue routing problem by maximizing the arc-based rescue efficiency, which is redefined as the ratio between the primary rescue input and output factors to represent the efficiency of the rescue operations. Therefore, a systematic methodology is proposed to decompose the original rescue routing problem into two decision making phases. First, an extended data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is constructed to evaluate the rescue efficiency along each arc. Specifically, a group decision constraint cone, which refers to the combined output of a group decision from experts, is constructed to distinguish the features and rescue focus of each disaster. Second, an efficiency-based routing model is developed to determine a feasible rescue tour for the entire transportation network, thus achieving the goal of maximizing the total rescue efficiency. An empirical example of a real earthquake disaster in Wenchuan, China, is provided to demonstrate the novelty and practical capabilities of the proposed approach in post-disaster emergency rescue operations. Finally, a comparison analysis is conducted with the traditional time-oriented routing method, and the results show that the method proposed in this study can improve the rescue performance by 21.2%.

In global supply chains, high uncertainty coming from liner shipping forces manufacturers who commit to on-time delivery to face great losses from tardiness or earliness. To find a reliable operational solution for shipment assignment, realizing the trade-off between the operations cost and reliability is highly essential. In this paper, a risk-hedging policy for shipment assignment is proposed. We incorporate risk aversion into the stochastic optimization model where the objective is to minimize the total deterministic operations cost and the weighted value-at-risk. The closed-form expressions of value-at-risk are derived and some structural properties of the optimization problem are revealed. Linearization techniques are utilized to make the proposed model tractable and solvable by an exact algorithm. Our computational studies further demonstrate the cost efficiency on systems reliability improvement through the risk hedging approach with job combination. It is interesting to uncover that being moderately risk-averse is wise, but possessing a very high risk-averse attitude is doing more harm than good as the increase of deterministic operations cost is much more significant than the decrease of value-at-risk. Being risk neutral may also be unwise as the chance of achieving the optimal expected total cost may be very low. In the extended models, we relax the assumptions and further consider scenarios with correlated shipping lead-times and stochastic exchange rate.

This paper investigates the optimal supply chain integration strategy for the manufacturer in a stylised dual-channel closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) consisting of one manufacturer, one retailer, a...

Some sub-coalitions can not be formed or fail to satisfy the superadditivity in many realistic cooperative transferable utility (TU) games, which particularly exists in the logistics service industry. To exploit some novel solutions for addressing these TU games, we firstly propose again the equal surplus division value based on the least square method and players’ common excess vector, and then introduce the weighted equal surplus division value. Both of them belong to the family of the least square values. Inspired by the fact that many TU games base the profit distribution strategies not only on the egalitarian principle but also on the utility principle, the equal contribution division value and the weighted equal contribution division value based on the least square method and players’ contribution excess vector are spontaneously generated. An algorithm is described to make the four solutions proposed in this paper satisfy the property of individual rationality. Finally, to show the advantages, the practicability and the rationality of the four solutions, a practical example about the profit distribution strategy of a logistics enterprise coalition is illustrated and the contrastive analysis among them is given.

This work develops a novel methodology for investigating dynamic evacuation route switching behavior and its influence on evacuation traffic assignment considering evacuees’ intuitionistic...

The Chinese government is offering subsidies to promote the recently developed China-Europe rail freight corridor under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Despite significant subsidies, the rail mode (China Railway Express) continues to struggle with low load factor. Accordingly, a competition model (rail vs. maritime) grounded on game-theoretic technique is proposed to analyze the effect of the government subsidy on shippers’ mode switching (from maritime to rail) behavior. Analytical results based on a case of China-Germany rail freight transportation describe shippers’ mode switching patterns in response to a mode subsidy and suggest a subsidy scheme for the government.

This paper considers a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) structure in which a manufacturer allows a retailer and a third-party remanufacturer to sell and remanufacture his products, respectively. Given the retailer’s distributional fairness concerns, we investigate the optimal/equilibrium decisions and profits under five non-cooperative and cooperative game models, and focus on how to allocate maximum profit in a centralized setting. Based on the classic Shapley value, we propose an innovative weighted allocation approach-namely, the variable-weighted Shapley value-to coordinate this CLSC. Numerical studies demonstrate that when remanufactured products are lowly accepted by consumers, our model outperforms the classic Shapley value.

Morning commuting trips commonly involve a number of transportation modes and departure times. This study extends the standard bottleneck model by considering both regular and shared autonomous vehicles with and without parking space constraint, taking into account the travel time-dependent fuel cost that is associated with each vehicle. In this study the parking space constraint has no effect on shared autonomous vehicles and only commuters who share autonomous vehicles exhibit ridesharing behavior, differing from those utilizing regular vehicles. The dynamic departure patterns and endogenous penetration rates associated with shared autonomous vehicles are determined with respect to parking capacity. Analytical results not only provide several important propositions, but also include the optimal solutions for parking capacity and ridesharing occupancy from the perspective of the system optimum in terms of various indicators, under which parking capacity is a binding constraint, and the first shared autonomous vehicle arrives at the bottleneck as the last regular vehicle leaves. This work is expected not only to motivate related research, but also to promote the development of new strategies and methods for allocating a limited number of parking spaces and regulating the travel behavior of commuters in urban areas.

The vehicle routing problem with drones (VRPD) is an extension of the classic capacitated vehicle routing problem, where not only trucks but drones are used to deliver parcels to customers. One distinctive feature of the VRPD is that a drone may travel with a truck, take off from its stop to serve customers, and land at a service hub to travel with another truck as long as the flying range and loading capacity limitations are satisfied. Routing trucks and drones in an integrated manner makes the problem much more challenging and different from classical vehicle routing literature. We propose a mixed integer programming model, and develop a branch-and-price algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on the instances randomly generated in a practical setting, and the results demonstrate the good computational performance of the proposed algorithm. We also conduct sensitivity analysis on a key factor that may affect the total cost of a solution.

Firms usually offer trade-in programs to entice consumers to purchase next generation products. By considering the purchase behavior of both myopic consumers and strategic consumers, we propose a game-theoretic analytical model to determine the optimal price of the next generation products and the optimal trade-in rebate. We find that firm’s optimal price of the next generation products increases with the incremental value. The optimal trade-in rebate decreases with the trade-in duration. The firm’s optimal profit increases with the trade-in duration, but decreases with the incremental value.

This work proposes a two-stage transport flow model to analyse the dynamics associated with the cross-border freight transport flows induced by the cross-governmental policy intervention. The stage...

This paper proposes a novel stochastic mathematical framework to investigate the connectivity of road networks impacted by earthquakes. The concepts of “global connectivity” and “local connectivity” are defined and evaluated using percolation theory. Specifically, global connectivity measures the extent to which the whole network is connected, and local connectivity measures the distances between each node to its neighbors. Furthermore, the concept of efficiency is employed to integrate local connectivity. A new percolation process integrating the traditional localized attack and random failure is proposed, which sheds light on the application of percolation theory to practical networks when facing disruptions.

This paper investigates the potential of Belt and Road economic corridors to serve as China-Europe trading route alternatives. By constructing a new Route Utility Function considering cost, environmental impact, mode reliability & security, transit time, and infrastructure reliability, we demonstrate the remarkable advantages of the corridors over the traditional ocean route and their heterogeneous impacts on different regions of China. The importance of considering infrastructure reliability for trading route selections is highlighted. More importantly, the analyses of this study could generate insightful implications for proper logistics planning under the development of other economic cooperation and trading agreements throughout the world.

Nowadays, consumers play a central role in shaping the right retailing strategy. Motivated by the popularity of trade-in-for-upgrade (TIFU) programs in consumer electronics industries, this study adopts a multi-methodological approach to comprehensively explore TIFU-related behavioral pricing and market competition challenges. Grounded upon consumer psychology and behavior theories, this study develops a generalized consumer choice behavior model which takes into account the potential effect of reference dependence choice behavior. A behavior-grounded analytical model is established. Both analytical and quantitative empirical analyses using multiple empirical data sources are conducted. One distinctive feature of the proposed model is the conceptualization of vendor-buyer collaborative value orientation (termed as syncretic value orientation in this paper) in business objective functions, where we advocate that the extended consumer responsibility (ECR) should be incorporated into the modeling and analysis. In particular, this study derives a generalized form of the analytical model to determine the syncretic value-oriented prices and trade-in rebates under TIFU market competition. The results further reveal that involving the syncretic value in business objectives favors not only a price-leading firm’s expansion of market share but also gaining additional profits with a low-price-low-rebate strategy. Utilizing a low-price-high-rebate strategy, a price follower can seize the opportunity to lead in market share when the price leader solely sets profit maximization as its goal in a competitive market.

This paper focuses on the overall handling efficiency and the system’s stability of container terminals with double cycling. A closed queuing network is used to model terminal operations, and theoretical upper and lower bounds of the system performance is obtained to show the maximum service availability of the terminals. The generally distributed service time indicates the impact of variations in service time on the system’s stability. Finally, real-world data is used to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the proposed model, and the analysis results provide policies to improve the terminal productivity.

A multi-objective linear program is formulated for systematically minimizing aggregate logistics costs, including economic costs (debris transportation and sweeping, and urgent recruitment of relat...

Crisis-induced vaccine supply chain management has recently drawn attention to the importance of immediate responses to a crisis (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). This study develops a queuing model for a crisis-induced vaccine supply chain to ensure efficient coordination and distribution of different COVID-19 vaccine types to people with various levels of vulnerability. We define a utility function for queues to study the changes in arrival rates related to the inventory level of vaccines, the efficiency of vaccines, and a risk aversion coefficient for vaccinees. A multi-period queuing model considering congestion in the vaccination process is proposed to minimise two contradictory objectives: (i) the expected average wait time of vaccinees and (ii) the total investment in the holding and ordering of vaccines. To develop the bi-objective non-linear programming model, the goal attainment algorithm and the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) are employed for small- to large-scale problems. Several solution repairs are also implemented in the classic NSGA-II algorithm to improve its efficiency. Four standard performance metrics are used to investigate the algorithm. The non-parametric Friedman and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests are applied on several numerical examples to ensure the privilege of the improved algorithm. The NSGA-II algorithm surveys an authentic case study in Australia, and several scenarios are created to provide insights for an efficient vaccination program.

This paper concerns the generation of a priori routes for a fleet of vehicles that pick up and deliver items with stochastic demands. A failure-specific cooperative recourse strategy is proposed to explore a risk pooling mechanism for routing in the context of simultaneous pickup and delivery with stochastic demands. By defining complete failure and semi-failure of routing, the travelling cost under our failure-specific cooperative strategy is estimated. Also, an adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm is developed. Compared with a strategy that involves no cooperation between vehicles, our strategy performs better in terms of reducing travelling costs, and balancing fleet size and detour frequency.

This paper studies the spatiotemporal variation of the worldwide air transportation network (WATN) induced by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The variations are captured from four perspectives: passenger throughput, network connectivity, airport centrality, and international connections. Further, this work also considers both global and local connectivity-based metrics for the network analysis. Supported by real-world data, we show that the performance of the WATN has experienced a dynamic pattern of decline and recovery in 2020. Interestingly, the network metrics undergo tremendous variations in a very short period after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, with the number of flights and connections dropping by more than 40% within only the first four weeks. Intuitively, the passenger throughput's changing rate is highly correlated to confirmed cases' growth rate during the early period of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the air transport response to the pandemic condition is very diverse among different countries. The major airports in the WATN fluctuate gradually in different pandemic stages, which is further influenced by the domestic pandemic situation that restricts airport operations. Also, the restoration speed of local connectivity is faster than that of global connectivity because the recovery of international aviation is geographically dependent on different policies of travel restriction, conditional openings, and the number of COVID-19 cases. The analysis deepens our understanding to formulate bilateral policies for pandemic-induced ATN design and management.

To analyse the hinterland patterns of the CHINA RAILWAY Express (CR express) in China under the Belt and Road Initiative, this paper first reviews the development stages of the CR express. Second, 5 typical CR express routes are examined to comparatively analyse the CR express and seaborne container shipping from the perspective of freight cost structure. According to the binary logit model, the current and the prospective hinterland patterns (choice probability) of two types of products of the CR express are explored. The results show that governmental subsidies for the operators of CR express contribute to decreasing 60% of CR express freight cost. And shippers of IT products are easier to choose the CR express than those of other products. As a result, Chongqing, Chengdu, Zhengzhou and Wuhan have the same opportunities to become the regional railway hub for IT product transport. In Chongqing, however, the high share of other products in CR express market will impact greatly on its competition for the regional railway hub among the aforementioned inland cities.

This work presents a multi-methodological approach to address the dynamic and stochastic challenges that underlie the problem of international logistic network reconfiguration induced by the One Belt-One Road initiative. A spatial-temporal logistics interaction model integrated with Markov chain is proposed to forecast time-varying logistic distribution flows for a three-layer supply chain framework. Further, numerical forecasts based on two cases of Chinese oil supply chain is carried out to account for the effectiveness of the proposed model. Analytical results suggest various development strategies for the practitioners and the policy makers in optimizing their logistics and transportation decisions in the OBOR context.

This study deals with the large-scale transnational high-speed railway construction evaluation problem, which is a major issue in implementing the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative. We proposed a method for the selection of the most urgent need for transnational high-speed railway construction in the B&R region, which was tested on massive experimental data. The results show that 18 sections in the B&R region have priority conditions to build high-speed railways in current situations, which to a great extent coincide with those road sections covered by high-speed railway projects under construction or to be put into construction in the B&R region.

In this paper, the most critical relief services are considered, including the transportation of injured people to hospitals, the transportation of evacuees from affected areas to shelters, and the...