Logistics plays a crucial role in chemical supply chains. In today's global tradeenvironment, companies are looking for ways to lower costs in order to remaincompetitive. To this end, many chemical companies are increasinglyoutsourcing a variety of their logistics services to third-party logistics (3PL)firms in the same or other countries. This has resulted in a steady increase in theuse of 3PL service-providers in the chemical sector. The objective of this paperis to model the outsourcing of various logistics services in terms of contractsoffered by various 3PLs for various individual and bundled tasks. Our goal is toobtain the optimal contracts, and thus the 3PLs, that serve the total needs of thecompany in an integrated manner. The problem is formulated as a multi-periodmixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem.
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