Our aim is to design a sustainable supply chain (SSC) network, which takes into consideration consumer environmental behaviors (CEBs). CEBs not only affect consumers’ demand for products with low carbon emissions, they also affect their willingness to pay premium prices for products with low carbon emissions. We incorporate CEBs into the SSC network model involving location, routing and inventory. Firstly, a multi-objective optimization model comprised of both the costs and the carbon emissions of a joint location-routing-inventory model is proposed and solved, using a multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. Then, a revenue function including CEBs is presented on the basis of a Pareto set of the trade-off between costs and carbon emissions. A computational experiment and sensitivity analysis are conducted, employing data from the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The results clearly indicate that our research can be applied to actual supply chain operations. In addition, some practical managerial insights for enterprises are offered.

Purpose: Additive manufacturing has achieved rapid development in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to visualize the intellectual landscapes of additive manufacturing and identify the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing, which can provide references for scholars, enterprises and governments to promote the development of theory and practice in the additive manufacturing field.Design/methodology/approach: Science mapping is a fast-growing interdisciplinary field originated in information science and technology. Based on this methodology, guided by a computational approach, the paper visualizes the co-occurring keywords network and co-citation references network by CiteSpaceIII software to explore the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing by the following five indicators: highly cited keywords, burst keywords, clusters, landmark references and burst references.Findings: “Additive manufacturing,” “3D printing,” “3D powder printing,” “consolidation phenomena,” “microstructure,” “rapid prototyping,” etc., are the main hotspots of additive manufacturing. The trends of additive manufacturing generally consist of three stages: the fundamental concepts stage from 1995 to 2000 (“rapid prototyping,” “additive manufacturing,” etc.), the approaches and techniques applications stage from 2001 to 2010 (“stereolithography,” “scaffold,” etc.), and the emerging trends stage from 2011 to the present (“stem cell”, “selective laser,” “ti-6al-4v,” etc.). The research is most abundant in 2010 and 2012. The medical field is an important hotspot of additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing has been researched in interdiscipline.Originality/value: The paper maps the perspective of additive manufacturing and explore the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing.

Owing to its interconnections and open characteristics, Physical Internet (PI) has the potential to help companies meet the sustainability challenges. In this paper, to investigate the sustainability performance of the PI in an integrated production-inventory-distribution system, we propose a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model (MOMILP) that encompasses all three dimensions of sustainability. The economic and environmental objectives are measured through the total cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, respectively. The social objective is captured by the impact of accident risk. Then, we solve the model by using the augmented ϵ-constraint method and compare the sustainability performance of the PI-enabled model with that of models enabled by the traditional (TR) and horizontal collaboration (HC) networks. The results show that the PI can not only improve the economic and environmental performance by increasing vehicle utilisation, but also alleviate the impacts of accident risks by avoiding risky routes. More interestingly, good compromise solutions featuring the PI can further improve the sustainability performance while guaranteeing the performance of the TR at the ideal point—something unachievable for the HC and TR. Moreover, sensitivity analyses demonstrate that the PI can still guarantee significant sustainability performance advantages under different common retailer quantities and network structures.

The concept of sustainable development requires us to explore a completeness model of low carbon transport and service in the light of the advancement of changes in world cooperation policy. Various kinds of carbon constraints not only limit emissions of contaminants from E-commerce Enterprise of different countries, but they also ensure the market activity around the Belt and Road, so as to avoid the implementation reducing the company’s profits significantly. This paper discusses of the strictest periodic low-carbon constraints_(PLC) and the expansion of the mainstream with three relatively weak attributes—cumulative_(CLC), full cycle_(FCLC), and volatility_(VLC)—taking into account the offline delivery of lead time and the online relationship between supply and demand on the platform. We have established four decision models with different carbon confinement intensities and inferred the impact of more detailed carbon constraints on E-commerce delivery strategies. The appropriate operational decisions, under a wide spectrum of carbon constraints, help e-companies develop scientific delivery plans, and provide some inspiration for the promotion of low carbon economy system construction and environmental significance.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative integration method based on decision-theoretic rough set and the extended VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) methods to address the resilient-sustainable supplier selection and order allocation (SS/OA) problem. Design/methodology/approach: Specifically, a two-stage approach is designed in this paper. First, the decision-theoretic rough set is employed to calculate the rough number for coping with the subjective uncertainty of data and assigning the weights for a resilient-sustainable evaluation criterion. On this basis, the supplier resilient-sustainable performance is ranked in combination with the extended VIKOR method. Second, a novel multi-objective optimization model is proposed that applies an improved genetic algorithm to select the resilient-sustainable supplier and allocate the corresponding order quantity under a multi-tier supplier network. Findings: The results reveal that joint consideration of resilience and sustainability is essential in the SS/OA process. The method proposed in this study based on decision-theoretic rough sets and the extended VIKOR method can handle imprecise information flexibly, reduce information loss and obtain acceptable solutions for decision-makers. Numerical cases validate that this integrated approach can combine resilience and sustainability for effective and efficient SS/OA. Practical implications: This paper provides industry managers with a new perspective on SS/OA from a resilience and sustainability perspective as a basis for best practices for industry resilience and sustainability. The proposed method helps to evaluate the resilient-sustainable performance of potential suppliers, which is applicable to solving real-world SS/OA problems and has important practical implications for the resilient-sustainable development of supply chains. Originality/value: The two interrelated priorities of resilience and sustainability have emerged as key strategic challenges in SS/OA issues. This paper is the first study of this issue that uses the proposed integrated approach.

Purpose: 3D printing is believed to be driving the third industrial revolution. However, a scientometric visualizing of 3D printing research and an exploration its hotspots and emerging trends are lacking. This study aims to promote the theory development of 3D printing, help researchers to determine the research direction and provide a reference for enterprises and government to plan the development of 3D printing industry by a comprehensive understanding of the hotspots and trends of 3D printing. Design/methodology/approach: Based on the theory of scientometrics, 2,769 literatures on the 3D printing theme were found in the Web of Science Core Collection’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) index between 1995-2016. These were analyzed to explore the research hotspots and emerging trends of 3D printing with the software CiteSpaceIII. Findings: Hotspots had appeared first in 1993, grew rapidly from 2005 and peaked in 2013; hotspots in the “medical field” appeared earliest and have remained extremely active; hotspots have evolved from “drug”, “printer”, “rapid prototyping” and “3D printing” in the 1990s, through “laser-induced consolidation”, “scaffolds”, “sintering” and “metal matrix composites” in the 2000s, to the current hotspots of “stereolithography”, “laser additive manufacturing”, “medical images”; “3D bioprinting”, “titanium”, “Cstem cell” and “chemical reaction” were the emerging hotspots in recent years; “Commercial operation” and “fusion with emerging technology such as big data” may create future hotspots. Research limitations/implications: It is hard to avoid the possibility of missing important research results on 3D printing. The relevant records could be missing if the query phrases for topic search do not appear in records. Besides, to improve the quality of data, this study selected articles and reviews as the research objects, which may also omit some records. Originality/value: First, this is the first paper visualizing the hotspots and emerging trends of 3D printing using scientometric tools. Second, not only “burst reference” and “burst keywords” but also “cluster” and “landmark article” are selected as the evaluation factors to judge the hotspots and trends of a domain comprehensively. Third, overall perspective of hotspots and trends of 3D printing is put forward for the first time.