Carbon constrained integrated inventory control and truckload transportation with heterogeneous freight trucks

Abstract

This paper analyzes an integrated inventory control and transportation problem with environmental considerations. Particularly, explicit transportation modeling is included with inventory control decisions to capture per truck costs and per truck capacities. Furthermore, a carbon cap constraint on the total emissions is formulated by considering emission characteristics of various trucks that can be used for inbound transportation. Due to complexity of the resulting optimization problem, a heuristic search method is proposed based on the properties of the problem. Numerical studies illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Furthermore, numerical examples are presented to show that both costs and emissions can be reduced by considering heterogeneous trucks for inbound transportation.