A review of infrastructure modelling for Green Logistics

Infrastructure modelling is a strategic level activity to make one or more decisions on the optimum location, number and allocation of service providers. This problem has been intensively researched in academic literature and traditionally focuses on minimizing total logistics costs or maximizing profit. But in many cases the optimum may involve dealing with multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives. Recently, climate change and environmental concerns in logistics network design have been increasingly discussed, and such ‘green issues’ are the main concern of the present paper. Our aim is to critically examine current techniques for infrastructure modelling and/or performance evaluation on Green Logistics. A comprehensive literature review provides an overview of supply chain modelling and their objectives. In particularly we are interested in techniques that consider both economic (gold) and environmental (green) criteria simultaneously. This paper argues that there is a need to incorporate environmental aspects into the logistics design so as to obtain a balanced sustainable assessment of supply chain infrastructure performance