Allocation of products to a heterogeneous fleet of trucks in a cross-docking center based on carbon emissions and costs in food and beverage industry: Novel uncertain solution approaches.

The threat of climate change continues to grow, which calls for strategies to reduce emissions. Carbon emissions from transportation are among the highest in the world, so it is essential to improve its efficiency. Cross-docking is a smart way to improve the efficiency of transportation operations through the optimal use of truck capacity. This paper develops a novel bi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to determine which products should be shipped together, select the most appropriate truck among the available ones, and schedule them. It reveals a new class of cross-dock truck scheduling problems, in which products are not interchangeable and are sent to different destinations. The first objective is to minimize overall system costs, while the second is to minimize total carbon emissions. To deal with uncertainties in factors, such as costs, time, and emission rate, these parameters are considered interval numbers. Furthermore, innovative uncertain approaches are introduced under interval uncertainty based on optimistic and pessimistic Pareto solutions for solving MILP problems via epsilon-constraint and weighting methods. The proposed model and solution procedures are used for planning an operational day at a regional distribution center (RDC) of a real food and beverage company, and results are compared. The results show that the proposed epsilon-constraint method outperforms the other implemented methods in terms of quantity and variety of optimistic and pessimistic Pareto solutions. Using the newly developed procedure, the amount of carbon produced by trucks could decrease by 18% under optimistic assumptions and 44% under pessimistic assumptions. As a result of the proposed solution approaches, managers can observe how their optimism level and the importance of objective functions influence their decisions.

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Model with Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets for Evaluating Digital Technology Strategies in COVID-19 Pandemic Under Uncertainty.

Coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an essential challenge to the health and safety of people, medical members, and treatment systems worldwide. Digital technologies (DTs) have been universally introduced to improve the treatment of patients during the pandemic. Nevertheless, only a few governments have been partly successful in executing the DT strategies. In this regard, it is critical to demonstrate a suitable strategy for the governments. This problem is built based on the experts' opinions with some conflicting criteria to evaluate various types of alternatives. Hence, this research presents a new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model under uncertain conditions. For this reason, interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) are employed to help decision-makers (DMs) evaluate in a broader area and cope with uncertain information. Moreover, a new extended weighting method based on weighted distance-based approximation (WDBA) and a new combined ranking approach are proposed to determine the DMs' weights and rank the alternatives under IVIF conditions. The developed weighting method is constructed based on computing the DMs' weights with objective criteria weights. Furthermore, a new ranking approach is proposed by obtaining two ranking indexes separately: The first and second ranking indexes are calculated according to the positive and negative ideal solutions distances and the nature of criteria weights, respectively. Afterward, the final values of rankings are computed by considering a new aggregating procedure. The results of the proposed model represent the first alternative as the best strategy. Comparisons between the IVIF-TOPSIS and IVIF-VIKOR methods are also provided to investigate the proposed model to determine the rankings of main alternatives. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to check the reliability and the robustness of the model. For this purpose, criteria weights are analyzed to compute the dependencies' degree of the new extended weighting method. The dependencies of the ranking model are discussed on the criteria weights as well.