A Layer-Based Relaxation Approach for Service Network Design
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article was well organized and clearly written. However, there are something missing and need to be improved.
1) This article is lack of "sustainability" related scheme. Authors should add more related sustainability literatures in review, result, and discussion. It should be more than 10 references added.
2) Authors should address the clearly research gap. It should begin with the intensively review of related literatures (both SND and sustainability).
2) Layout of the article should be rechecked and corrected such as in page 4 the Decision Variables should be moved to the next line, also in Formulation (Page 5).
3) The objective function should be corrected in usual form. If it's an equation, you should give the equation number after it.
4) Font size in figure should be enlarged. Especially in Figure 7.
5) Spell check is needed. Soluyion time (sec.) should be corrected.
6) Consistency of word is recommended. Figure 8 and 9 should use "Original" instead of "Primal".
7) Conclusion section must be improved. What are your contributions? Does the contribution result in SND? Which aspects of sustainability were improved by using your research findings?
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have developed a layer-based relaxation heuristic, splitting up the problem in the temporal dimension, to develop a solution for service network design problem with heterogeneous fleet and consolidation terminals. To examine the efficiency of their heuristic, the authors develop results for medium and large sized instances, and compare the performance of the layer-based relaxation heuristic against the commercial solver. Based on these results, the authors argue for the efficient performance of the heuristic developed in this work. However, such a comparison is incomplete for two reasons. To begin with, the authors must test the heuristic on standard instances. And secondly, the authors must then compare the performance of their heuristics with other heuristics from the literature.
In this regard, the authors must appropriately update the literature review discussing heuristics developed for the service design network problem, and consequently update results comparing performance with these heuristics instead.
Only after such a comprehensive comparison, the performance of layer-based relaxation heuristic can be judged.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Work may be accepted with addition of some recent literature from MDPI journal
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for your resubmitting. Many issues were closed and I appreciated it.
However, some issues need additional improvement.
1) Sound of sustainability in this articles is still inadequate. Please add references in topic of "green supply chain network design" or "green logistics" in your literature review section and discussion section. The satisfied number of above mentioned references should not less than 10 references.
2) Because your objective function is mainly to minimize "cost", so you have to add the contribution of your findings to answer the very important research question about linkage between "cost" and "sustainability". What will happen after cost was reduced? (related to sustainability)
3) Please check the intent meaning of the sentence in line 197
"...reduce the competitiveness..."
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have addressed the comments and therefore this work is good for publication.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Needs section on empirical validation with details on threats, to research approach
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
All issues is resolved. I appreciate the authors' attempts. This paper should be accepted.
