Modeling Resilience Enhancement Strategies for International Express Logistics

摘要

International express is a most time-sensitive industry, whose members may need to responddisruptions quickly in order to insure service quality and avoid losing their competitiveness withother logistics service providers. Instead of arbitrarily making rushed decisions during thepost-disruption phase, this paper contributes a method for quantifying and optimizing resiliencestrategies based on integrated resource assignment concepts, regardless of how the availableresources are located with respect to the studied logistics network or how much capacity can berented from others.The study starts from a typical transportation network modeling approach and then incorporatesnonlinear time-dependent cargo value functions into a multi-objective mixed integer nonlinearprogramming (MMINLP) problem. A set of optimal actions from resilient strategies areconsidered, such as: selecting alternative routes, switching shipping modes, renting other carriers’capacities, re-allocating local trucks, and prioritizing the order of shipments due to limitedcapacities. Decisions should be based on overall trade-off considerations, while jointlymaximizing the product of total time-dependent cargo value and the corresponding throughput,and minimizing the costs incurred with resilience enhancement strategies.