In the context of city logistics, freight transportation is one of the prominent causes of traffic congestion, high levels of pollution, and safety concerns. To decrease the negative impact of these issues, different methods have been traditionally implemented. On the one hand, the location of urban consolidation Centers (UCCs) near a city can be used to consolidate freight delivery services. Therefore, the number of trucks moving in urban areas can be reduced. On the other hand, Horizontal Cooperation can also help to reduce environmental impact while increasing service level. This paper combines both strategies, that is, we deal with the location of UCCs and, simultaneously, we analyze different scenarios where the players of different supply chain processes exhibit various levels of cooperation. Thus, different levels of cooperations regarding routing and UCCs-location decisions are considered in the following scenarios: (a) non-cooperative case, in which all decisions are decentralized (i.e., each enterprise solves its own vehicle routing problem); (b) low-cooperative case, where depot capacities are shared but the customers are still being served by each company's fleet of vehicles; (c) semi-cooperative case, based on centralized route planning decisions (i.e. facilities and fleets are shared among participating enterprises); and (d) fully cooperative scenario, where the routing plans and facility-location decisions are taken by consensus amongst all the participants. In order to estimate the benefits of both strategies, we propose a flexible metaheuristic algorithm to deal with the combined location and routing problem under the different cooperative scenarios. Our results show impressive benefits of the proposed approach.

Digitalization is impacting almost every aspect of people’s life and is greatly affecting supply chain processes. At the same time, supply chains are becoming progressively more aware of their impacts on people, the planet and profits (triple bottom line perspective) and the concept of sustainable supply chain has received increasing attention among scholars and practitioners. In this context, this article aims to analyze scientific research on supply chain management in the field of sustainability and digitalization using a bibliometric approach. To this end, this article analyses 484 papers from Scopus database according to the following parameters: chronology, discipline, source, center, country and citations. The dataset consisted of articles from scientific journals published over the period 2002–2018. In addition, VOSviewer software is used to map the bibliographic material using the co-occurrence of keywords and most influential journals. The analysis reveals that: sustainability and digitalization are important emerging fields within supply chains that have increased significantly during the last ten years; the USA is the most influential country; and the topic is structured around 2 clusters (1) Supply chain management, concepts and practices and (2) energy related technologies. The results may facilitate the planning, designing, running and publishing of future research on this topic.