Coping with the Rise of E-commerce Generated Home Deliveries through Innovative Last-mile Technologies and Strategies

Miguel Jaller and Anmol Pahwa

Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis

Abstract: E-commerce can potentially make urban goods flow economically viable, environmentally efficient, and socially equitable. However, as e-retailers compete with increasingly consumer-focused services, urban freight witnesses a significant increase in associated distribution costs and negative externalities, particularly affecting those living close to logistics clusters. Hence, to remain competitive, e-retailers deploy alternate last-mile distribution strategies. These alternate strategies, such as those that include the use of electric delivery trucks for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced drivers for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, or collection-points for customer pickup, can restore sustainable urban goods flow. Thus, in this study, the authors investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with alternate last-mile distribution strategies for an e-retailer offering expedited service with rush delivery within strict timeframes. To this end, the authors formulate a last-mile network design (LMND) problem as a dynamic-stochastic two-echelon capacitated location routing problem with time-windows (DS-2E-C-LRP-TW) addressed with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic. View the NCST Project Webpage

Keywords: Business; Engineering; Alternatives analysis; Delivery service; Electronic commerce; First mile and last mile; Routes; Urban goods movement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay and nep-tre
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