Designing a Resilient and Sustainable Logistics Network under Epidemic Disruptions and Demand Uncertainty

Aymen Aloui,Nadia Hamani,Laurent Delahoche

doi:10.3390/su132414053

Aymen Aloui, Nadia Hamani + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su132414053

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Dec 20, 2021
Citations: 14	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Picardie Jules Verne

Abstract

To face the new challenges caused by modern industry, logistics operations managers need to focus more on integrating sustainability goals, adapt to unexpected disruptions and find new strategies and models for logistics management. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that unforeseen fragilities, negatively affecting the supply chain performance, can arise rapidly, and logistics systems may confront unprecedented vulnerabilities regarding network structure disruption and high demand fluctuations. The existing studies on a resilient logistics network design did not sufficiently consider sustainability aspects. In fact, they mainly addressed the independent planning of decision-making problems with economic objectives. To fill this research gap, this paper concentrates on the design of resilient and sustainable logistics networks under epidemic disruption and demand uncertainty. A two-stage stochastic mixed integer programming model is proposed to integrate key decisions of location–allocation, inventory and routing planning. Moreover, epidemic disruptions and demand uncertainty are incorporated through plausible scenarios using a Monte Carlo simulation. In addition, two resiliency strategies, namely, capacity augmentation and logistics collaboration, are included into the basic model in order to improve the resilience and the sustainability of a logistics chain network. Finally, numerical examples are presented to validate the proposed approach, evaluate the performance of the different design models and provide managerial insights. The obtained results show that the integration of two design strategies improves resilience and sustainability.

Highlights

Published: 20 December 2021In recent years, supply chains have become more complex and very vulnerable to various disruptions [1,2,3,4]
This paper evaluates the performance of two resilience strategies from a resilience perspective, and from a sustainability perspective in the integrated design of two-echelon logistics networks subject to epidemic disruptions
To assess the performance of the introduced strategies in designing sustainable and resilient logistics networks, we report and discuss, the findings obtained in five design configurations, namely, the non-disrupted model (NDM), the disrupted model (DM), the disrupted model with the capacity expansion strategy (DMCE), the disrupted model with a logistics collaboration strategy (DMCL) and the disrupted model with both capacity expansion and logistics collaboration strategy (DMCECL)

Summary

Introduction

Published: 20 December 2021In recent years, supply chains have become more complex and very vulnerable to various disruptions [1,2,3,4]. Logistics networks have confronted uncertainties significantly disrupt the supply chain operations [5,6]. The latter may be influenced by natural disasters, strikes, fluctuations in the electrical system, economic or political crises and epidemic disruptions of infectious diseases [7,8,9,10]. Disruption remarkably affects the entire logistics system [13]. The epidemic disruption propagation and operational risks in the logistics network design have become key issues that should be dealt with in order to face uncertainty risks

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