Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
3.4 Decomposition Heuristic Approaches
An alternative to systemic approaches is that of decomposition methods that are
based on a logical separation of the overall system into a set of connected sub-
systems (in general, by assigning transport demands to satellites, then constructing
2nd stage routes to finally obtain the 1st stage routes). It is not very easy to identify
all such works, since some of them do not show directly then multi-stage nature of
transport systems, but a general separation method can be found in Crainic ( 2008 )
and Crainic et al. ( 2009 ). The main advantage of such methods is that they can deal
with more specific aspects of urban distribution such ad dynamic travel times,
access time windows or multi-trip systems, among others.
4 Socio-Economic and Practical Implications of Two-Tier
Schemes
As shown above, two-tier city logistics systems can be an interesting approach to
reduce transport cost. However gains on transport cost are not alone in ensuring
the success of these schemes (Gonzalez-Feliu 2012b ). Indeed, the socio-economic
context has to be taken into account because the feasibility of multi-stage transport
systems depends also on other factors (Gonzalez-Feliu 2013a ). According to
Gonzalez-Feliu and Morana ( 2011 ), three types of factors can be defined. The
motivators are the factors that contribute to the development of a transportation
system with cross-docking. According to Gonzalez-Feliu ( 2012b ), four groups of
motivators can be defined:
• Performance motivators, on an economic, environmental and value viewpoints.
They are related to economic efficiency, the prestige of the partners, and image.
Sustainable performance is an important element to be included in this category
(Gonzalez-Feliu and Morana 2011 ).
• Legislation and jurisprudence issues, mainly related to collaboration but also to
transactions and formal or informal sub-contracting.
• Financial motivators, related to funding mechanisms of such systems (Gonz-
alez-Feliu et al. 2013a ). Those factors are still few studied but they can con-
stitute key success factors if well identified and analysed, as shown in Gonzalez-
Feliu and Morana ( 2011 ).
• Relation motivators, closely related to habits and inter-personal relations. When
stakeholders have already been involved together in collaborative or cooperative
schemes resulting on positive impacts on their logistics performance, collabo-
rative transportation is more naturally taken into account than in cases where
such conditions are not met. Moreover, non-competing and complementary
companies are more concerned with these types of approaches in the absence of
legislative or financial motivators.
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