Modeling Resilience Enhancement Strategies for International Express Logistics

Abstract

International express is a most time-sensitive industry, and members of this industry must be able to respond to disruptions quickly to ensure service quality and to avoid a loss of their competitiveness with other logistics service providers. Instead of a method that arbitrarily makes rushed decisions during the postdisruption phase, this paper describes a method for quantifying and optimizing resilience strategies based on concepts of integrated resource assignment, regardless of where the available resources are located in the logistics network studied or how much capacity can be rented from others. The study started with the use of a typical transportation network modeling approach and then incorporated nonlinear time-dependent cargo value functions into a multiobjective mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. A set of optimal actions from resilience strategies, such as the selection of alternative routes, switching of shipping modes, rental of other carriers' capacities, reallocation of local trucks, and prioritization of the order of shipments because of limited capacities, was considered. Decisions should be based on overall trade-off considerations and, at the same time, joint maximization of the product of the total time-dependent cargo value and the corresponding throughput and minimization of the costs incurred with resilience enhancement strategies.