scholarly journals The Scope for Pavement Porters: Addressing the Challenges of Last-Mile Parcel Delivery in London

Author(s):  
Julian Allen ◽  
Tolga Bektas ◽  
Tom Cherrett ◽  
Oliver Bates ◽  
Adrian Friday ◽  
...  

The UK parcel sector generated almost £9 billion in revenue in 2015, with growth expected to increase by 15.6% to 2019 and is characterized by many independent players competing in an “everyone-delivers-everywhere” culture leading to much replication of vehicle activity. With road space in urban centers being increasingly reallocated to pavement widening, and bus and cycle lanes, there is growing interest in alternative solutions to the last-mile delivery problem. We make three contributions in this paper: firstly, through empirical analysis using carrier operational datasets, we quantify the characteristics of last-mile parcel operations and demonstrate the reliance placed on walking by vehicle drivers with their vans being parked at the curbside for on average 60% of the total vehicle round time; secondly, we introduce the concept of “portering” where vans rendezvous with porters who operate within specific geographical “patches” to service consignees on foot, potentially saving 86% in driving distance on some rounds and 69% in time; finally, we highlight the wider practical issues and optimization challenges associated with operating driving and portering rounds in inner urban areas.

2020 ◽  
Vol 295 (2) ◽  
pp. 645-693
Author(s):  
Antonio Martinez-Sykora ◽  
Fraser McLeod ◽  
Carlos Lamas-Fernandez ◽  
Tolga Bektaş ◽  
Tom Cherrett ◽  
...  

AbstractInspired by actual parcel delivery operations in London, this paper describes a two-echelon distribution system that combines the use of driving and walking as part of last-mile deliveries in urban areas for a single driver. The paper presents an optimisation model that explicitly treats and integrates the driving and walking elements, and describes a branch-and-cut algorithm that uses new valid inequalities specifically tailored for the problem at hand. Computational results based on real instances obtained from a courier operating in London are presented to show the performance of the algorithm.


Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1058-1086
Author(s):  
Franklin Oliveira ◽  
Daniel G. Costa ◽  
Luciana Lima ◽  
Ivanovitch Silva

The fast transformation of the urban centers, pushed by the impacts of climatic changes and the dramatic events of the COVID-19 Pandemic, will profoundly influence our daily mobility. This resulted scenario is expected to favor adopting cleaner and flexible modal solutions centered on bicycles and scooters, especially as last-mile options. However, as the use of bicycles has rapidly increased, cyclists have been subject to adverse conditions that may affect their health and safety when cycling in urban areas. Therefore, whereas cities should implement mechanisms to monitor and evaluate adverse conditions in cycling paths, cyclists should have some effective mechanism to visualize the indirect quality of cycling paths, eventually supporting choosing more appropriate routes. Therefore, this article proposes a comprehensive multi-parameter system based on multiple independent subsystems, covering all phases of data collecting, formatting, transmission, and processing related to the monitoring, evaluating, and visualizing the quality of cycling paths in the perspective of adverse conditions that affect cyclist. The formal interactions of all modules are carefully described, as well as implementation and deployment details. Additionally, a case study is considered for a large city in Brazil, demonstrating how the proposed system can be adopted in a real scenario.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (17) ◽  
pp. 9481-9490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyo Suh ◽  
Timothy Smith ◽  
Michelle Linhoff

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Samouh

This thesis focuses on exploring the emerging automated technologies for last-mile on-demand food delivery as a new means of transportation to reduce congestion in urban areas. In order to achieve that 4 systems are designed and evaluated: Robot delivery system, drone delivery system and two hybrid delivery systems. Both hybrid systems are based on hub-spoke networks, Hybrid System 1.0 uses robots for phase one of the delivery and drones for phase two Hybrid System 2.0 uses drones for phase one and robots for phase two. To evaluate the efficiency of these systems, an in-house agent-based simulation model in MATLAB is developed for the City of Mississauga. 30 scenarios are tested differing in terms of demand and fleet size. The results show that Hybrid system 2.0 is the most efficient system of all four proposed due to the use of hub, customer waiting time and landing zones for drones.


2021 ◽  
pp. 115894
Author(s):  
Li Jiang ◽  
Xiaoning Zang ◽  
Ibrahim I.Y. Alghoul ◽  
Xiang Fang ◽  
Junfeng Dong ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Christian Fikar ◽  
Manfred Gronalt

"Last-mile distribution in urban areas is challenged by congestion and restriction for motorized traffic. To support operations, this work investigate the impact of operating urban consolidation points and facilitating cargo-bikes for urban last-mile distribution. Motivated by sample setting originating from the food delivery industry, a decision support system combining agentbased simulation with heuristic optimization procedure is developed. It considers a logistics provider who performs the last-mile delivery for multiple competing restaurants in an urban area. Therefore, both demand and the availability of cargo-bikes, which are operated by freelancers, are subject to randomness. Computational experiments investigate the impact of the available amount of cargo-bike drivers as well as the number of operated consolidation points, highlighting the importance of facilitating simulation models to support operations in highly dynamic and uncertain settings."


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 325-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Allen ◽  
M. Piecyk ◽  
M. Piotrowska ◽  
F. McLeod ◽  
T. Cherrett ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pengkun Zhou

Cooperation between a truck and a drone for last-mile delivery has been viewed as a way to help make more efficient ways of delivery of packages because of the great advantage of drones delivery. This problem was described and formulated a as FSTSP by Maurry and Chu. Because of the weakness concerning drones' batteries lifespan, this paper proposed a new delivery scenario in which a charge-station will be applied in the truck-drone delivery network to increase the performance of the last-mile delivery. This new delivery problem is formulated for the first time in this thesis as a multi-objective problem. The purpose of this is to address both transportation cost and total time consumption. Data analysis is conducted to explore the relation between factors and the overall objective. The analysis shows that a charge-station will significantly increase the performance of the last-mile delivery. Lastly, future work is discussed that will enhance the model even more and possibly lead to better ways to use drones for delivery.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document