Two-echelon urban deliveries using autonomous vehicles

Shaohua Yu, Jakob Puchinger and Shudong Sun

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2020, vol. 141, issue C

Abstract: We introduce a two-echelon urban delivery problem with second-level unmanned vehicles. This problem typically applies for delivering parcels or other small commodities to pedestrianized areas such as campuses or residential clusters. To model the proposed vehicle routing problem, we introduce a mixed-integer program. We further propose construction heuristics and a hybrid metaheuristic approach with backtracking for solving larger instances. A sensitivity analysis for vehicle speed combinations reveals that increasing small autonomous vehicle (SAV) speeds has only very limited effects on cost. We therefore recommend to keep SAV speeds rather low because of a more pedestrian friendly environment in practical implementations.

Keywords: Two-echelon vehicle routing; Urban deliveries; Autonomous vehicles; Hybrid metaheuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554520306694
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:141:y:2020:i:c:s1366554520306694

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2020.102018

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().