Retail

In the last decades, companies in the retail sector have faced growing customer demands for convenient delivery of products combining the alternatives of traditional in-store shopping and online shopping providing home deliveries or pickups at specific pickup locations, along with global aims to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions worldwide with respect to the global climate change. Targets to reduce emissions are supported by a majority of the world’s societies and companies. Especially retailers are characterized by very high transportation volumes with often very small transportation lot sizes. Here, distribution networks need to be designed that allow low energy consumption while still addressing customer demands. Simulation has been a core method to analyze such networks and underlying processes with respect to costs, but also enables detailed analyses of the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of such systems. This chapter gives an overview of the scope and objectives for retail distribution systems and present challenges for respective simulation models, both addressing Discrete Event Simulation and System Dynamics. Furthermore, it presents three application studies and gives an outlook to future research and applications.