Sustainable Warehousing: The Interplay Between Human Well-Being and Energy Consumption

Warehouses are key nodes in global supply chains, and they have recently experienced profound changes due to numerous ever demanding challenges, such as e-commerce boost, growing service level requirements, increasing personnel costs and labor shortages. These challenges have significantly affected the design and management of warehouses, with implications for sustainability. In this context, besides the conventional economic perspective, both environmental and social perspectives have been gaining increasing attention. On the one hand, warehouse contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been acknowledged by several scholars in literature, fostering studies about energy efficiency measures and green warehousing strategies. On the other hand, the role of human operators and their working conditions in logistics facilities, as well as their impact on operational outcomes are gaining attention in the literature, with current trends moving towards the study of human factors and human well-being. Currently, the European Union directives are promoting joint consideration of these aspects, in line with the new paradigm of Industry 5.0, which fosters the adoption of a human-centric approach to enhance overall sustainability and resilience. However, existing literature still primarily focuses on these two aspects separately, without discussing implications of different measures from both environmental and social sustainability perspectives. This study aims to fill this gap by providing an analytical model that combines work-rest scheduling strategies for human operators and battery charging strategies for material handling equipment, assessing their impact both on human well-being and energy consumption. The objective of this research is to evaluate, from a twofold perspective, how different operational strategies can improve sustainability in logistics facilities. Multiple scenarios are considered and implemented in the analytical model to assess synergies and trade-offs. Implications for academia and practitioners are addressed, and future research directions are provided.