Modeling of sustainable integrated supply chains under the consideration of European Union regulations

This work introduces a multi-period, multi-commodity, inventory-routing problem with strategic fleet scheduling decisions, under the consideration of speed limits, as well as strict European Union regulations on truck drivers’ working and driving time. To address the new problem, a mixed integer linear programming model was developed. Several artificial but realistic problem instances were randomly generated following relative guidelines from the open literature, to validate and assess the performance of the novel mathematical model. Furthermore, in an effort to produce useful managerial insights, several sensitivity analyses were performed considering different fluctuation rates on key model parameters.