Selection of consolidation center locations for China railway express to reduce greenhouse gas emission

To explore the environmental concerns created by China’s Belt and Road initiative, and to solve problems such as duplication of routes, inefficient use of resources, and excessive competition in the operation of the initiative’s China Railway Express component of the initiative, we studied optimization of the locations of China Railway Express consolidation centers. We selected 28 candidate nodes through a three-criterion screening mechanism. To account for the network’s operating costs and greenhouse gas emission, we developed a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model and applied the augmented ε-constraint method to solve it. Our analysis selected Qingdao, Harbin, Changchun, Taiyuan, Urumqi, and Tianjin as consolidation centers.