A two-stage heuristic solution for multi-depot collaborative pickup and delivery network with transfers to reduce carbon emissions.

Sharing resources and curbing emissions are critical for promoting the adoption of cleaner logistics technologies and improving environmental sustainability. However, little research has examined reducing the impact of carbon emissions on the environment by considering transfer between depots. Hence, this study investigated the impact of carbon emissions on a multi-depot collaborative pickup and delivery network with time windows and transfers (MDCPDPTW-Ts) and proposed a carbon emissions measurement to describe the relationship between fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Then, a two-stage heuristic framework was proposed to simplify MDCPDPTW-Ts and generate high-quality delivery routes. Finally, a case study from Dalian, China, was used to verify the effectiveness of the research methodology. The results demonstrated the following: (1) The multi-depot transfer network constructed in this paper is significantly better than the traditional no-transfer scheme, reducing the cost by 26.64%. (2) Sharing transfer facilities among different depots is the most attractive mode of realizing clean logistics, reducing the emission cost by 59.2% compared with the traditional depot-based transfer scheme. (3) Reasonable carbon prices and carbon quotas are highly significant to establishing a sustainable carbon trading market. As carbon prices increase, carbon emissions first show a sharp reduction trend and then gradually tend to remain unchanged. Therefore, this work can provide practical and theoretical implications for the sustainable development of multi-depot collaborative logistics. [Display omitted] • Transfer locations reduce complexity of the multi-depot collaboration system. • Adaptive iterated local search improves quality of solutions. • Minimizing transportation cost simultaneously reduces fuel and carbon emissions. • The proposed transfer scheme has lower emissions than the traditional scheme. • Carbon quotas and prices to conserve energy and curb emissions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]