Building Resilient Global Logistics Network with Physical Internet and Robust Optimization

Logistics and supply chain resilience have become a critical priority in an era of increasing global uncertainty. The Physical Internet (PI) offers a transformative vision for logistics: an open, shared, and interconnected network that inherently promises greater resilience and sustainability. This paper investigates how PI principles can be proactively integrated into multimodal logistics networks to enhance their resilience and environmental performance. We first propose a pragmatic decision-making framework to guide managers through a step-by-step process for logistics network design and enhancement. Building on this framework, we develop two PI-based resilient network redesign strategies. To evaluate these strategies, we formulate the problem using a robust optimization model with a budget of uncertainty, and tailor an ALNS algorithm to solve large-scale, nearreal-world instances. Our computational experiments and sensitivity analyses assess the strategies' effectiveness across various disruption scenarios, different industries, and both onshoring and offshoring typologies of supply chains. The results demonstrate that PI-based strategies can improve network resilience while also contributing to reduced carbon emissions, providing actionable and meaningful insights for practitioners.