An emission constrained reliability index to evaluate a sustainable logistics network with multiple vehicle types

From the perspective of sustainable development, mitigating the environmental impact of logistics activities involved in the transportation process is a crucial aspect of logistics management. This study incorporates transportation emission into reliability analysis of a sustainable logistics network where a node stands for a supplier, a transfer station or a customer, and a route connecting a pair of nodes stands for a freighter responsible for delivery service. A freighter’s capacity is indeed stochastic because of uncertainties in vehicle availability and different freighters may have different types of vehicles, thus, a logistics network can be captured as stochastic-flow network (SFN) in which each route is featured with multi-valued capacities. Zeroing in on transportation capacity and emission, this study defines network reliability as the probability that a certain amount of goods can be transported from multiple sources to the destination while the amount of carbon emissions generated by all types of vehicles stay within a limit. An algorithm, based on minimal paths (MPs) and a novel emission estimation model, is developed to calculate the reliability indicator, along with an example to exemplify the procedure. Additionally, the practicality of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through a case study of an actual logistics network.