Dynamic assignment of loading bays for efficient urban last mile deliveries

Abstract

Urban freight deliveries are facing problems of limited accessibility to customers located in the city centre. Due to lack of loading bays, freight vehicles are forced to double parking or circulating in the city centre to find an available loading bay. To solve that problem a model for dynamic management of urban last mile deliveries has been developed. The optimisation is based on fuzzy c-means clustering of customers to dynamically assign the best possible loading bay in combination with a two-echelon routing algorithm. The model is tested on the actual data of deliveries to the historical city centre of Lucca, Italy. Results of simulations have proven significant savings of the total travel time and distance in comparison to the existing situation. The suggested approach is highly flexible and allows adaptation to any city access restriction scheme.