Lu Zhen

Shanghai University | SHU

Annually, over 10 billion tons of construction and demolition waste is transported globally from sites to reception facilities. Optimal and effective planning of waste transportation holds the potential to mitigate cost and carbon emissions, and alleviate road congestion. A major challenge for developing an effective transportation plan is the unce...

The efficient operation of container ports relies on the coordination of operational problems including berth allocation and container internal transportation routing. Yard layout designs with diagonal cross lanes may bring more opportunities for future container terminals, and this opportunity requires further evaluation of operational performance...

The design of emission control areas (ECAs), including ECA width and sulfur limits, plays a central role in reducing sulfur emissions from shipping. To promote sustainable shipping, we investigate an ECA design problem that considers the response of liner shipping companies to ECA designs. We propose a mathematical programming model from the regula...

Managing Shipping Emission Control Areas The design of emission control areas (ECAs) is crucial for reducing global shipping emissions and protecting the environment. In “Shipping Emission Control Area Optimization Considering Carbon Emission Reduction,” Zhuge, Wang, and Zhen focus on the ECA optimization problem for sailing legs with ECAs. First,...

In this paper, we introduce the daily berth planning problem for Xiamen Hai-Tian Container Terminal (XHCT) at the Port of Xiamen, China, and propose the development and implementation of a berth planning system. The aim of the berth planning problem is to optimize daily berth plans by considering various decisions, including berth allocation, quay...

Cleaning operations are required to clear particles and residual chemical gases in processing chambers of cluster tools in semiconductor manufacturing. To clean the chambers, condition-based chamber cleaning operations considering the actual state of chambers have been developed in practice. For single-armed cluster tools with such operations and w...

As a relatively clean energy source, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is experiencing a growing demand. The uneven global distribution of LNG often compels residents in regions without local sources to import it, underscoring the need to optimize the global LNG transportation network. Therefore, this study formulates a nonlinear mixed-integer programmin...

Ship fouling has significant adverse effects on vessel performance and environmental sustainability. Therefore, this research study develops a bi-level programming model to simultaneously optimize cleaning equipment deployment by cleaning service providers in the upper level and cleaning decisions by shipping companies in the lower level. To addres...

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Maritime transport Interpretable machine learning models Ship fuel consumption prediction Domain knowledge in shipping Mixed-integer quadratic optimization A B S T R A C T Ship fuel consumption is a major component of maritime transport costs and most of its emissions are harmful to the environment. Hence, it is esse...

Data-driven traffic modeling is revolutionizing transportation systems and provides numerous opportunities for achieving high-quality transportation services. A major challenge in optimizing transportation systems is uncertain transportation demand. With the availability of historical data on transportation demand, the uncertain transportation dema...

In the era of e-commerce, a new business mode—e-grocery platform has become popular in recent years. An e-grocery platform need not own and operate shops. The platform assigns the orders that customers release on the platform to the part-time couriers; then the couriers go to some nearby shops, buy the commodities required by orders, and deliver th...

Many warehouses involved in e-commerce order fulfillment use robotic mobile fulfillment systems. Because demand and variability can be high, scheduling orders, robots, and storage pods in interaction with manual workstations are critical to obtaining high performance. Simultaneously, the scheduling problem is extremely complicated because of intera...

Maritime transport serves as the backbone of international trade, accounting for more than 90% of global trade. Although maritime transport is cheaper and safer than other modes of transport, it often means long sailing distances, which often results in substantial fuel consumption and emissions. Liner shipping, a vital component of maritime transp...

Logistical activities have a significant global environmental impact, necessitating the adoption of green logistics practices to mitigate environmental effects. The COVID-19 pandemic has further emphasized the urgency to address the environmental crisis. Operations research provides a means to balance environmental concerns and costs, thereby enhan...

As an innovative public transport, the customized bus has rapidly grown. To improve the efficiency of customized bus and satisfy customers’ personal requirement, a mixed-integer programming model is proposed to optimize the stop assignment for customers and route scheduling for buses with walking distance constraints and travel time constraints. As...

Machine learning (ML) techniques are extensively applied to practical maritime transportation issues. Due to the difficulty and high cost of collecting large volumes of data in the maritime industry, in many maritime studies, ML models are trained with small training datasets. The relative predictive performances of these trained ML models are then...

The greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has forced the shipping industry to actively reduce the amount of CO2 emissions emitted directly into the atmosphere over the past few years. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is one of the main technological methods for reducing the amount of CO2 emissions emitted directl...

Due to European Union (EU) oil sanctions, tanker shipping companies need to redeploy their tankers by moving tankers between ship routes with the consideration of flag states of tankers, but the literature lacks quantitative methods for this problem. To fill this research gap, this paper studies an integrated problem of fleet deployment, fleet repo...

This study aims to address one critical issue in ship inspection planning optimization, where the first step is to accurately predict ship risk, and the second step is to assign scarce port inspection resources, aiming to identify as much non-compliance from the inspected ships as possible. A traditional decision tree is first developed as the benc...

The development of the Internet of things (IoT) and online platforms enables companies and governments to collect data from a much broader spatial and temporal area in the logistics industry. The huge amount of data provides new opportunities to handle uncertainty in optimization problems within the logistics system. Accordingly, various prescripti...

This study investigates a variant of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) for customized on-demand bus service platforms. In this problem, the platform plans customized bus routes upon receiving a batch of orders released by passengers and informs the passengers of the planned pick-up and drop-off locations. The related decision process takes into acc...

The vehicle routing problem is the main content of intelligent transportation and plays a very important role in the logistics industry. Trucks and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) collaborative delivery is an emerging intelligent delivery mode that can deliver packages in a more timely and efficient manner than traditional delivery models. A multit...

Prefabrication is an advanced construction approach that has drawn increasing attention from the construction industry. Governments worldwide have begun to offer subsidies to establish local prefabrication factories (LPFs) to increase the uptake of prefabrication and decrease the transport emissions of prefabricated components (PCs). The establishm...

Governments and contractors have different goals in handling construction and demolition waste (CDW), which makes it challenging to design CDW recycling networks. This paper develops a Stackelberg game model that governments can use to decide the optimal locations and types of CDW disposal facilities by considering the interests of both the governm...

Emergencies, especially those considered routine (i.e., occurring on a daily basis), pose great threats to health, life, and property. Immediate response and treatment can greatly mitigate these threats. This research is conducted to optimize the locations of ambulance stations, deployment of ambulances, and dispatch of vehicles under demand and tr...

Diesel-driven rubber-tired gantry cranes play an important role in the carbon emission and operating efficiency of the port. Retrofitting diesel-driven rubber-tired gantry cranes to electric-driven rail-mounted gantry cranes is one of the effective ways to reduce carbon emissions. However, the retrofit of diesel-driven rubber-tired gantry cranes wi...

Maritime transport plays an important role in global economic development but also inevitably faces increasing pressures from all sides, such as ship operating cost reduction and environmental protection. An ideal innovation to address these pressures is electric ships, which are more environmentally friendly than conventional manned fuel oil ships...

The inbound process is of great importance in enhancing the efficiency of automated warehouse operations. This study investigates an optimization problem on the inbound warehouse process by coordinating multiple resources in a type of automated warehouse system, i.e., Shuttle-Based Storage and Retrieval System (SBS/RS). A mixed-integer programming...

The rapid development of intelligent warehouse systems is resulting in the realization of automation in warehouse activities and raising awareness of decarbonization, particularly the need to reduce carbon emissions from electricity consumption. Driven by the decarbonization trend, microgrid systems with rooftop photovoltaic panels are becoming mor...

This study investigates an integrated optimization problem on the three main types of equipment used in a new design of multi-tier automated warehouse: automated guided vehicles, lifts and shuttles. A mixed-integer programming model is proposed to optimize the assignment of pallets to the related equipment and the storage locations during inbound p...

The ‘lazy economy’ gives rise to an emerging business mode, called personal shopper platforms (PSPs). A customer who needs some goods urgently can release an order on a PSP, which is then assigned by the platform to a personal shopper, who will buy the goods at a nearby retail store and deliver them to the customer within a short time interval. Sin...

Improving container ports’ operational efficiency to reduce the delays at ports concerns global port operators significantly. Optimizing the tactical level allocation of quay side and yard side resources to vessel calls is a typical lever to mitigate the delays in operations. Another lever is by strategical level planning that re-adjust the preferr...

The Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System (RMFS) is a parts-to-picker warehouse system where robots are used to fetch inventory goods from the storage area and transport them to the workstation. To improve the overall performance of the order picking process, this paper investigates an integrated order and robot scheduling optimization problem. We form...

Rehabilitation is an important branch of the modern healthcare system. Every day, rehabilitation patients move in hospital campus to receive treatments from therapists. The long timespan of these treatment routes leads to several patients’ complaints and results in negative effects. However, scheduling the treatment routes for patients is a complex...

The truck and drone-based cooperative model of delivery can improve the efficiency of last mile delivery, and has thus increasingly attracted attention in academia and from practitioners. In this study, we examine a vehicle routing problem and apply a cooperative form of delivery involving trucks and drones. We propose a mixed-integer programming m...

To effectively decrease emissions and pollution emitted by equipment in container ports, many ports began to update equipment using diesel fuels to achieve the aim of green ports. This paper studies an internal truck renewal problem in container ports and proposes a two-stage stochastic programming model to optimally determine internal truck compos...

Exhaust fumes from the shipping industry pose a serious threat to the environment and residents’ health in coastal areas. The use of shore power during ship berthing is an effective measure to reduce air pollution near the port. Due to the high investment cost, the deployment of the ship-borne power receiving system is seriously hindered. This stud...

Under the green ports initiative, port operations rely more on electric power. However, the power system is vulnerable to disruptions. Its ability to resist disruption seriously affects port resilience, which is related to the port operation’s level and performance. To maintain a resilient port, its infrastructure needs to be well designed and coor...

The green and sustainable development of ports is an issue of great concern to governments, industries, and academia. Carbon emissions near ports mainly come from ships and trucks. The effective allocation of resources and the implementation of a carbon tax policy may reduce carbon emissions near ports. Therefore, this paper investigates an integra...

Blockchain technology implementation in a circular supply chain management (CSCM) context is an emerging topic that involves complex processes and diverse goals. This study aims to develop a framework that describes the main phases of Blockchain-enabled CSCM and evaluates the critical success factors of Blockchain implementation for CSCM. Further,...

Shuttle-based storage and retrieval system (SBS/RS) is a smart warehouse system evolved from automated storage and retrieval system. It is used for the storage and order picking of products in e-commerce warehouses because of its flexibility and low-carbon feature. This paper investigates the multi-item order batching and retrieving problem for SBS...

In the design of green ports, the strategic decision on what types of container transportation equipment are appropriate is extremely important. Yard trucks (YTs) are indispensable in container transportation. In this paper, we propose a YT retrofitting and deployment problem that considers hazardous material transportation in green ports. A stocha...

E-commerce, new retail, and other changes have highlighted the requirement of high efficiency and accuracy in the logistics service. As an important section in logistics and supply chain management, warehouses need to respond positively to the increasing requirement. The “smart warehouse” system, which is equipped with emerging warehousing technolo...

This paper introduces a container transportation scheduling problem in a large logistic company (Yunfeng) in Shanghai City, PR China. This problem considers two types of container transportation orders (i.e., door-to-door orders and warehouse orders) between port yards and the hinterland. Unlike the pickup and delivery problem with time windows, th...

The consistent vehicle routing problem (ConVRP) aims to design synchronized routes on multiple days to serve a group of customers while minimizing the total travel cost. It stipulates that customers should be visited at roughly the same time (time consistency) by several familiar drivers (driver consistency). This paper generalizes the ConVRP for a...

Maritime transport is the backbone of international trade and globalization. Maritime transport research can be roughly divided into two categories, namely the shipping side and the port side. Most of the classic approaches adopted to address practical problems in these research topics are based on long-term observations and expert knowledge, while...

Recent trends in pursuing green ports have had positive effects on terminal operators constructing more eco-friendly decision schemes. A yard template in a container port not only determines the scheduling of the terminal handling equipment by container allocation, but also affects the carbon emissions from yard trucks caused by loading and unloadi...

Emergencies that pose potential threats to our health, life, and properties can happen anywhere and anytime and may result in huge losses if they are not handled timely and effectively. An immediate response to emergencies is the key to mitigate these threats and losses. As the response time is largely dependent on the number and location of emerge...

This paper considers promoting off-site construction using government subsidy. A three-stage Stackelberg game model is formulated for the optimal subsidy design for the government, accounting for the decisions of government, suppliers (owners of off-site construction yards), and customers (entities that buy precast concrete from the suppliers). The...

This article investigates a low carbon-oriented berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem considering vessels’ uncertain arrival time and loading/unloading workload for vessels. A two-stage stochastic programming model is formulated based on a set of scenarios. The first stage designs a baseline schedule and the second stage adjusts the sc...

This paper considers the transportation of prefabricated products in the construction industry. Prefabricated products can be transported by road transport or intermodal transport, the latter of which incurs lower carbon emissions. A construction contractor always selects the transport mode with a lower cost rather than one with a lower carbon emis...

Large e-commerce retailers usually establish their own logistics systems. Such systems make use of their own dedicated fleets but will also use a crowdsourced delivery mode by hiring occasional fleets. These mixed logistics systems with both dedicated and occasional fleets serve both retailers’ internal delivery tasks and external tasks requested b...

In semiconductor manufacturing, an extremely stringent quality control is enforced for wafer fabrication processes. Consequently, cleaning operations that clear residual chemical gases and heat in the chambers are frequently performed. As one kind of cleaning operations, a purge operation which executes a cleaning operation each time a wafer is rem...