Smart Scheduling: An Integrated First Mile and Last Mile Supply Approach

Abstract

Supply chain management applies more and more Industry 4.0 innovations to increase their availability, elasticity, sustainability, and efficiency. In interconnected logistics networks, operations are integrated from suppliers through 3rd party logistics providers to customers. There are different delivery models depending on the time and cost. In the last few years, a wide range of customers is willing to pay an extra fee for the same delivery or instant delivery. This fact led to the increased importance of the optimized design and control of first mile/last mile (FMLM) delivery solutions. Cyberphysical system-based service innovations make it possible to enhance the productivity of FMLM delivery in the big data environment. The design and operation problems can be described as NP-hard optimization problems. These problems can be solved using sophisticated models and methods based on heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms. This research proposes an integrated supply model of FMLM delivery. After a careful literature review, this paper introduces a mathematical model to formulate the problem of realtime smart scheduling of FMLM delivery. The integrated model includes the assignment of first mile and last mile delivery tasks to the available resources and the optimization of operations costs, while constraints like capacity, time window, and availability are taken into consideration. Next, a black hole optimization-(BHO-) based algorithm dealing with a multiobjective supply chain model is presented. The sensitivity of the enhanced algorithm is tested with benchmark functions. Numerical results with different datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model and validate the usage of Industry 4.0 inventions in FMLM delivery.

The Association between Urban Public Transport Infrastructure and Social Equity and Spatial Accessibility within the Urban Environment: An Investigation of Tramlink in London

“…In this sense, a system that cancels the tram payment if an individual makes a further journey on national rail services could allow low income households to enjoy the improved accessibility of Croydon without the added financial cost. Where there is a lack of critical density to support regular shuttle buses, smart scheduling such as that detailed in Banyai et al's [90] analysis for delivery services could be adapted to produce methods that would allow those living outside an active travel zone to gain access to such services. This would help to reduce unnecessary movements in providing free services as the demand for such services would fluctuate, especially where there is a lack of density to make formalized public transport feasible; this would be a method of adapting suburbia without costly retrofitting [90,91].…”

“…Where there is a lack of critical density to support regular shuttle buses, smart scheduling such as that detailed in Banyai et al's [90] analysis for delivery services could be adapted to produce methods that would allow those living outside an active travel zone to gain access to such services. This would help to reduce unnecessary movements in providing free services as the demand for such services would fluctuate, especially where there is a lack of density to make formalized public transport feasible; this would be a method of adapting suburbia without costly retrofitting [90,91]. Reducing demand for travel through effective intervention in the local context to encourage neighbourhoods to offer a greater selection of services could also be beneficial, with localised results highlighting areas that lack such facilities.…”

U-Shaped Assembly Line Balancing by Using Differential Evolution Algorithm

“…Later, [14] proposed a DP formulation for solving problems of numerous U-lines with a maximum of 22 tasks. The objective was to assign the tasks to workstations in various ways, aiming to minimize the number of workstations and time wasting [15,16]. This integrated model was solved with a black hole optimization based algorithm.…”

A Multi-Objective Programming Approach to Design Feeder Bus Route for High-Speed Rail Stations

“…In fact, our problem is also similar to some routing and scheduling problems in the domain of transportation, such as cash transportation vehicle routing and scheduling problem [28,29], first and last mile delivery problem [30][31][32], waste collection routing problem [33][34][35] and dial-a-ride problem [36,37]. Considering the locations of customers and some specific constraints (e.g., time windows and vehicle capacity), the solution approaches to these problems cannot be applied to our problem directly.…”