Locating urban logistics terminals and shopping centres in a Chinese city

This paper demonstrates, through a case study of a Chinese city, a process to locate and size both logistics terminals (LTs) and shopping centres, with the objective of minimising the total costs of retail supply chains, including personal shopping trips. We modelled these supply chains from the intercity transportation nodes, through LTs, through shopping centres (SCs) and on to the final consumers. We found a solution that approached minimising all the operating and capital costs. We compared our solution with reality, and found that our results closely replicated real life. We concluded that this case study supports the use of this planning process. One can use such models to indicate how local planning authorities can reduce environmental costs while at the same time reducing total logistics costs.