Integrated approaches for logistics network planning: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners often separate logistics network planning into strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. Due to the interdependence among these levels of decisions, their integration can bring important cost reductions and better network responsiveness in scenarios where there is business change. However, integrated problems entail challenges, such as decision timing, and they are more difficult to model and solve. This article presents a literature review of integrated problems in logistics network planning. The objective is to identify the main integrated decisions, their scopes, integration approaches, and the solution methods used. Although this review addresses research with decisions at different hierarchical planning levels, we observed that integration of strategic and tactical decisions is more common and some of the integration approaches are single-level mono-period models, single-level multi-period models, multi-time scale models, and multi-level models. There is a predominance of aggregated data in these studies. Regarding the solution methods, there is a predominance of heuristic approaches over exact ones, including methods based on decomposition or sequential procedures. Based on the findings of this systematic review, we draw a conceptual framework presenting the main modelling assumptions, integration strategies, and solution methods to the integrated problems, and we also discuss some promising research opportunities.