Physical internet enabled sustainable and resilient production-routing problem with modular capacity

Abstract

Purpose

Modular capacity units enable rapid reconfiguration, providing tactical flexibility to efficiently meet customer demand during disruptions and ensuring sustainability. Moreover, the Physical Internet (PI) enhances the potential of modular capacity in addressing efficiency, sustainability, and resilience challenges. To evaluate the sustainability and resilience advantages of the PI-enabled reconfigurable modular system (PI-M system), this paper studies a PI-enabled sustainable and resilient production-routing problem with modular capacity.

Design/methodology/approach

We develop a multi-objective optimization model to assess the sustainability and resilience benefits of combining PI and modular capacity in a chemical industry case study. A hybrid solution approach, combining the augmented e-constraint method, construction heuristic, and hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search, is developed.

Findings

The experimental results reveal that the proposed solution approach is capable of obtaining better solutions than the Gurobi and the existing heuristic in a shorter running time. Moreover, compared with the traditional system, the PI only and traditional with modular capacity systems, PI-M system has significant advantages in both sustainability and resilience.

Originality/value

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to integrate the PI and modular capacity and investigate sustainability and resilience in the production-routing problem.

Citation

Peng, X., Ji, S., Zhang, L., Thompson, R.G. and Wang, K. (2024), "Physical internet enabled sustainable and resilient production-routing problem with modular capacity", Kybernetes, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-02-2024-0329