Lu Zhen

Shanghai University | SHU

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...

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...

As an essential carrier of cross-border trade, the maritime supply chain has always been plagued by long service cycles, complex structures, and heterogeneous information from multiple sources. In this context, as a distributed database system, the emerging blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, tamper-proofness, and tra...

This study investigates an integrated model for the continuous berth allocation and quay crane scheduling problem by considering quay crane coverage range, ship fuel consumption, and transshipment costs. A nonlinear mixed-integer programming model is proposed. Some nonlinear parts in this model are linearized by approximation approaches. While the...

This study aims to: (1) Analyze the influence of organizational culture on the performance of Civil Servant Education Personnel at the Ujung Pandang State Polytechnic office; (2) Analyzing the impact of the power of Locus of Control on the Performance of Civil Servant Education Personnel at the Ujung Pandang State Polytechnic Office; (3) Analyze...

In this work, we present and evaluate heuristic techniques for a real-world territory design problem of a major dairy company which produces and distributes perishable products. The problem calls for grouping customers into geographic districts, with the objective of minimising the total operational cost, computed as a function of the fixed costs o...

In the era of sharing economy and the mobility-as-service, the last mile delivery system is undergoing revolutionary changes with emerging a lot of new operation modes and policies. The crowdsourced delivery mode has become a novel and popular practice in the last mile delivery industry. This mode brings a novel way for facilitating the efficiency...

The fast-growing practice of e-commerce implies a strong increase in the urban parcel delivery, which in turn creates significant pressure on last-mile city logistics. Because the crowdsourced delivery offers greater flexibility and requires less capital investment than traditional delivery methods, it has been playing a more crucial role when face...

This book gathers selected papers presented at the KES International Symposium on Smart Transportation Systems (KES-STS 2021). Modern transportation systems have undergone a rapid transformation in recent years, producing a range of technological innovations such as connected vehicles, self-driving cars, electric vehicles, Hyperloop, and even flyin...

Air emissions from ships have become an important issue in sustainable shipping because of the low quality of the marine fuel consumed by ships. To reduce sulfur emissions from shipping, the International Maritime Organization has established emission control areas (ECAs) where ships must use low-sulfur fuel with at most 0.1% sulfur or take equival...

This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework to improve the efficiency of ship traffic in port. In the framework, ship agents, terminals, tug company, pilot station, and government share information and the information is stored in a blockchain. Based on the shared information, we discuss three categories of data-driven models that can improve...

Optimization of the green logistics location-routing problem with eco-packages involves solving a two-echelon location-routing problem and the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. The first echelon consists of large eco-package transport, which is modeled by a time-discretized transport-concentrated network flow programming in the resourc...

The industrial symbiosis initiative, which aims to reuse waste resources, is considered as a potential solution for sustainable manufacturing. Compared with much literature for the industrial symbiosis optimization about waste energy and wastewater, this paper proposes an industrial symbiosis optimization model based on the waste material recycling...

The Emission Control Areas (ECAs) established by the International Maritime Organization are beneficial to reduce the sulphur emissions in maritime transportation but bring a significant increase in operating cost for shipping liners. Low sulphur emissions are required when ships berth or sail within ECAs. It is an irreversible trend that green tec...

As a green port and shipping‐related policy, the vessel speed reduction incentive program (VSRIP) involves using a subsidy to induce ships to reduce their speed in a port area so that the emissions can be reduced at the port. However, this program may attract new ships to visit the port because of the subsidy; in this case, the port's profit will g...

This study investigates a joint optimisation of routing and truck deployment for a small-package shipping company. Bus tour-based services are provided to collect express packages at customer bases. The objective of the optimisation problem is to minimise the average waiting time for packages stored at the customer bases. We first propose a mixed-i...

This study investigates a multi-depot multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows and release dates, which is a practical problem in the last mile distribution operations. This problem aims to design a set of trips for the fleet of vehicles supplied by different depots for minimizing total traveling time. It addresses some realistic consid...

Gas and particulate emissions from ship transportation have been increasing in recent years. In order to mitigate ship emissions near coastal areas, voluntary vessel speed reduction incentive programs (VSRIPs) were put in place by a number of ports. This paper studies a schedule design problem faced by liner shipping companies under VSRIPs. It prop...

Pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and particulate matters (PM) generated by shipping industry are increasing in recent years. In order to control the ship emission pollution, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has established the Emission Control Areas (ECAs). In the fierce competition of the shipping market...

This book gathers selected papers presented at the KES International Symposium on Smart Transportation Systems (KES STS 2020). Modern transportation systems have undergone a rapid transformation in recent years, producing a range of technological innovations such as connected vehicles, self-driving cars, electric vehicles, Hyperloop, and even flyin...

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has proposed to impose the carbon taxation on ports in the long term. The implementation of the carbon taxation policy will increase the operating cost and decrease its efficiency. Therefore, there is a trade-off between improving port operational efficiency and reducing carbon emission in ports. This s...

Fully automated sorting equipment plays a crucial role in modern distribution networks of the parcel service industry, and the efficiency of the sorting scheme is crucial for the sorting equipment. This study optimizes the sorting scheme for a type of double-layer sorting equipment, which adapts “component-sorting” strategy. “Component-sorting” ref...

Global ports and maritime shipping networks are important carriers for global supply chain networks, but they are also the main sources of energy consumption and pollution. To limit ship emissions in ports and offshore areas, the International Maritime Organization, as well as some countries, has issued a series of policies. This study highlights t...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used to perform monitoring tasks both in the military and civilian areas, and the planning of their routes is critical. This study investigates a routing problem in which UAVs monitor a set of areas with different accuracy requirements. This problem is a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem (VR...

To improve customer service in the reverse logistics, this article defines a new variant of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) by combining the consistent VRP (ConVRP) and the VRP with simultaneous distribution and collection (VRPSDC). This new variant is called the consistent vehicle routing problem with simultaneous distribution and collection, fo...

The continuous influence of global warming has profoundly changed the operation mode of the traditional supply chain network. The balance between costs reduction and environmental protection has become an effective attempt to improve sustainable competitiveness for enterprises. This study presents an integration perspective for developing a green a...

With the development of green logistics, logistics companies gradually are paying attention to the application of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). HEVs have the advantages of low energy consumption and pollution, while their disadvantage mainly lies in their limited continuous driving range. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the use of fuel du...

This paper solves a strategic-level decision problem on determining the optimal location of (re)manufacturers and logistics centres with the consideration of facility scales in an integrated closed-loop supply chain network. A two-stage stochastic mixed-integer non-linear programming model is established to minimise the fixed cost and the expected...

Coal mine safety is the foundation of coal mine enterprise development, and inspections performed by safety personnel are an indispensable part of ensuring the production of coal mines. The complex network of tunnels in underground mines restricts the efficiency of safety inspection routes; therefore, planning these routes is critical. This study i...

This paper studies an integrated optimization problem on quay crane and yard truck scheduling in container terminals. A mixed-integer programming model is formulated. For the model, we show the integrated scheduling problem is strongly NP-hard and investigate some properties that can considerably reduce the computational complexity. For solving the...

This paper models and solves a fleet deployment and demand fulfillment problem for container shipping liners with consideration of the potential overload risk of containers. Given the stochastic weights of transported containers, chance constraints are embedded in the model at the strategic level. Several realistic limiting factors such as the flee...

The vigorous development of O2O e-commerce promote the appearance of many small orders, increasing the stresses on logistics operators to carry out city distribution. However, a crowdsourcing joined to release these stresses is a new try and become more popular. This paper focuses on matching of the crowds and tasks from crowdsourcing platform for...

A container terminal is a complex system in which the makespan of a ship service depends not only on the operations of quay cranes (QCs) but also on the operations of yard cranes (YCs) and the horizontal transportation by trucks. This paper addresses the joint QC schedule and block allocation of YCs in container terminals. We determine the QC sched...

This paper investigates crane scheduling problems for a new type of automated container terminal system, which is based on multi-storey frame bridges. For the new design concept, this paper studies how to schedule two types of cranes, i.e., quay cranes and bridge cranes that transfer containers between different storeys. The schedules of these two...

This paper provides an integrated planning model for container shipping liners. For a shipping network with multiple routes connected by transshipment hubs, the model can simultaneously decide ship deployment along routes, a service schedule including visit times and speed on legs, and cargo allocation to routes for each origin-destination pair. Th...

Instance data for ConVRPSDC

Automatic guided vehicles are widely used in various types of warehouses including the automated container terminals. This paper provides a decision framework for port managers to design and schedule automatic guided vehicle routing plans under time-varying traffic conditions. A large number of computational experiments on a grid graph are conducte...

This study optimizes the design of a closed-loop supply chain network, which contains forward and reverse directions and is subject to uncertainty in demands for new & returned products. To address uncertainty in decision-making, we formulate a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer non-linear programming model to determine the distribution center loca...

This study investigates an integrated optimization problem on the three main types of resources used in container terminals: berths, quay cranes, and yard storage space. It presents a mixed integer linear programming model, which takes account of the decisions of berth allocation, quay crane assignment, and yard storage space unit assignment for in...

In a hinterland barge transport system, barges are usually not self-propelled and need to be towed or pushed by tugs. This study investigates a tug-scheduling problem at a seaport that is located at a river mouth and that connects the hinterland ports along the river with the global maritime transportation network. A mixed-integer programming model...

The cruise industry has maintained a steady growth in the past 20 years. Due to the large number of cruise passengers and regulations on sea environment protection, determining at which ports to dispose of the waste generated onboard a cruise ship is a key decision to reduce the cost for a cruise company. We address four versions of the problem: th...

This paper studies an integrated decision problem on assigning and sequencing tasks to service providers. By considering the uncertain available time of the service providers, a stochastic programming model is proposed on the basis of a finite set of scenarios. Some realistic factors are also taken into account and formulated as some non-linear cos...

This study investigates a quay crane scheduling problem with considering the impact of tides in a port and fuel consumption of ships. A mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed. Some nonlinear parts in the model are linearized by approximation approaches. For solving the proposed model in large-scale problem instances, both a local bra...

This paper addresses a problem of ship type decision considering empty container repositioning and foldable containers, which determines the capacity of ships deployed in a given shipping route at a tactical level and empty container repositioning between ports at an operational level. It considers the use of foldable containers and aims to find un...