Consideration of triple bottom line objectives for sustainability in the optimization of vehicle routing and loading operations: a systematic literature review

The current global interest in improving the use of ever-scarcer natural resources calls for the re-alignment of supply chain operations to include not only economic factors, but environmental and social factors as well. Two of the most important supply chain activities that logistics managers have to deal with are the planning and improvement of the packing and distribution of products. Although the optimization of these two activities has been thoroughly studied by means of Vehicle Routing Problems and Packing Problems, their analysis is often done separately and, in most cases, they consider only the economic decisions. Independent optimization of these two operations may overlook the structural dependencies between them, resulting in impractical solutions; while the consideration of only the economic criteria can overlook the environmental and social impacts of distribution activities, in the scope of sustainable supply chains. With the objective of improving distribution logistics, the aim of this review is to provide an overview of recent optimization developments for integrating packing and routing problems, in order to propose a simple classification scheme for re-aligning the optimization criteria and operational constraints, taking into consideration the issues of sustainability.