Competing through the last mile: Strategic 3D printing in a city logistics context

Recently, 3D Printing (3DP) has started disrupting transportation worldwide by providing enormous simplifications to requirements, especially in the context of city logistics. In near future, potential exists replace multi-echelon hubs with integrated logistics and printing manufacturing hubs. This study investigates this concept, particularly for healthcare product distribution (i.e., hearing aids) customers located within a environment. We propose an efficient mathematical model investigate various scenarios 3DP production planning provide insightful analysis. It might seem counter-intuitive that tighter delivery time slots can improve utilization capacity machines, but finds intelligent selection policies simultaneously benefit both customer supplier. By integrating delivery, identifies opportunities firms survive thrive era challenging