This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

The authors have plagiarized Figure 2 from a paper that had already appeared in Geography of Transport Systems , J. P. Rodrigue, https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/conc5en/automobilesupplychain.html. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.