A Formal Approach for Milk-Run Transport Logistics

A formal approach for specifying and reasoning about earth-friendly logistics management systems is presented. To reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions resulting from transport, we must enhance the transport efficiency of trucks, which play an essential role as carriers in modern logistics services. This paper addresses the milk-run approach. It is one of the most effective and popular solutions to this problem, but it makes it be complicated to implement in a logistics management system. We propose a language for specifying the routes of trucks and an order relation between the requirements of routes and the possible routes of trucks. The former is formulated as process calculus and the latter selects suitable trucks according to their routes.