Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective

Abstract

In the wake of e-commerce and its successful diffusion in most commercial activities, last-mile distribution causes more and more trouble in urban areas all around the globe. Growing parcel volumes to be delivered toward customer homes increase the number of delivery vans entering the city centers and thus add to congestion, pollution, and negative health impact. Therefore, it is anything but surprising that in recent years many novel delivery concepts on the last mile have been innovated. Among the most prominent are unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and autonomous delivery robots taking over parcel delivery. This paper surveys established and novel last-mile concepts and puts special emphasis on the decision problems to be solved when setting up and operating each concept. To do so, we systematically record the alternative delivery concepts in a compact notation scheme, discuss the most important decision problems, and survey existing research on operations research methods solving these problems. Furthermore, we elaborate promising future research avenues.

A mixed integer linear programming model to support e-fulfillment strategies in warehouse-based supermarket chains

“…In addition to considering the nature of products and possible improvements in travel, in recent years the tight shipping times have been creating a problem in the lastmile transport. As a result, practitioners innovated in many concepts, among which unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and autonomous delivery robots that take charge of the delivery of orders stand out (Boysen et al 2020). Furthermore, authors such as Liu et al (2020) developed a multi-objective optimization model in which these alternatives are introduced to meet the expectations of customers.…”

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Last-Mile Delivery Considering Backhauls

“…Constraint ( 7) states that when the GV visits a customer node ∈ , it must depart from there. Constraint (8) indicates that the UAV is launched from a departing node ∈ 0 at most once, while (9) ensures that the UAV returns to an arriving node ∈ + at most once.…”

“…Since Murray and Chu [8] introduced a mathematical model for this hybrid delivery system in 2015, many followup studies have investigated extended versions of the routing problem [9]. Although these studies focused on one-way linehaul (delivery) service that runs from depot to customer, there is a large demand for backhaul (pickup) service on the other side of logistics.…”

Understanding customers' adoption of express delivery service for last-mile delivery in the UK

“…The different influences of delivery speed and reliability on customers' intention to adopt an express delivery service argue for the need to distinguish between them while evaluating the delivery performance. Future studies could identify more comprehensive segmentations of delivery performance, namely, more differentiated independent constructs to present the delivery performance of express services (Allen et al 2018;Mangiaracina et al 2019;Ignat and Chankov 2020;Premkumar, Gopinath, and Mateen 2020) or other last-mile delivery scenarios (Boysen, Fedtke, and Schwerdfeger 2020;Cai and Lo 2020). When taking a closer look at the construct delivery reliability, in addition to the measurement items of timeliness and correctness of shipping location covered in this paper, future studies could consider more factors in questionnaires, such as intactness and correctness of product, etc.…”