scholarly journals Shortening the Last Mile in Urban Areas: Optimizing a Smart Logistics Concept for E-Grocery Operations

Smart Cities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Leyerer ◽  
Marc-Oliver Sonneberg ◽  
Maximilian Heumann ◽  
Michael H. Breitner

Urbanization, the corresponding road traffic, and increasing e-grocery markets require efficient and at the same time eco-friendly transport solutions. In contrast to traditional food procurement at local grocery stores, e-grocery, i.e., online ordered goods, are transported directly to end customers. We develop and discuss an optimization approach to assist the planning of e-grocery deliveries in smart cities introducing a new last mile concept for the urban food supply chain. To supply city dwellers with their ordered products, a network of refrigerated grocery lockers is optimized to temporarily store the corresponding goods within urban areas. Customers either collect their orders by themselves or the products are delivered with electric cargo bicycles (ECBs). We propose a multi-echelon optimization model that minimizes the overall costs while consecutively determining optimal grocery locker locations, van routes from a depot to opened lockers, and ECB routes from lockers to customers. With our approach, we present an advanced concept for grocery deliveries in urban areas to shorten last mile distances, enhancing sustainable transportation by avoiding road traffic and emissions. Therefore, the concept is described as a smart transport system.

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Phillips-Connolly ◽  
Aidan J. Connolly

The grocery store is ground zero in the tsunami of change facing Big Food. Consumers are changing how they relate to grocery stores, increasingly circling the perimeter, focusing on produce and preferentially choosing fresh, local, and new, even unknown, brands while spending less time in the processed food aisles in the center. The next generation, the millenials, are increasingly shunning traditional outlets when buying food. Traditional leading brands of processed food, backed by traditional marketing strategies (heavy advertising on traditional media, coupons, brand extensions, etc.) are failing to hold on to their customers. The challenges can be found throughout the food value chain, from new competitors for grocery providers to new delivery mechanisms, from changes in generational food preferences with social media platforms to express their preferences to farmers who increasingly can and want to communicate directly with the end-users who actually eat the food that they produce. This access to more information opens more options (and opportunities) to buyers and suppliers all along the food value chain. Barely 100 years old, the grocery store model is becoming obsolete, and with it the organization of the food value chain must be re-written. So what does that mean for Big Food and the food supply chain? What directions can the industry take to adjust to the new competitive realities? This paper offers direction and guidance for Big Food and other producers in the food supply chain.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario E. Vallejo ◽  
Victor M. Larios ◽  
Veronica Gutierrez Magallanes ◽  
Cecilia Cobian ◽  
Maria de la Luz Guzman Castaneda ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9633
Author(s):  
Inayatullah Shah ◽  
Mohammed El Affendi ◽  
Basit Qureshi

In the context of smart cities, ridesharing in urban areas is gaining researchers’ interest and is considered to be a sustainable transportation solution. In this paper, we present SRide (Shared Ride), a multi-hop ridesharing system as a mode of sustainable transportation. Multi-hop ridesharing is a type of ridesharing in which a rider travels in multiple hops to reach a destination, transferring from one driver to another between hops. The key problem in multi-hop ridesharing is to find an optimal itinerary or route plan for a rider from an origin to a destination in a dynamic, online setting. SRide adopts a novel approach to finding itineraries for riders suited to the online nature of the problem. The system represents ride offers as a time-dependent directed graph and finds itineraries dynamically by updating the graph incrementally and decrementally as ride offers are updated in the system. The system’s distinguishing feature is its incremental and decremental operation, which is enabled by employing dynamic single-source shortest-path algorithms. We conducted two extensive simulation studies to evaluate its performance. Metrics, including the matching rate, savings in total system-wide vehicle-miles, and total system-wide driving times were measured. In the first study, SRide’s dynamic update algorithms were compared with their non-dynamic versions. Results show that SRide’s algorithms run up to thirteen times faster than their non-dynamic versions. In the second study, we used data from the travel demand model for metropolitan Atlanta in the US state of Georgia, to assess the benefits of multi-hop ridesharing. Results show that matching rates increase up to 68%, saving in total system-wide vehicle-miles of up to 12%, and reduction in the total system-wide driving time of up to 12.86% is achieved.


Author(s):  
T. M. Özbekler ◽  
A. Karaman Akgül

Abstract. As current cities are attributed to particular dynamism consists of population density and increased urbanization, urban areas are facing some challenges for city logistics, both in terms of economic, environmental, and social impact. Especially, the debates over last-mile logistics are arising with inefficiencies in delivery cost (half truckload on delivery) and delivery time per parcel (unnecessary waiting-load periods at multiple stops) while inner-urban areas are especially suffered from traffic congestion, emission, and noise pollution. In this regard, smart cities as a concept with the potential to produce sustainable solutions to urban problems bring along with the need for innovative urban logistics systems to make conventional distribution channels of the city up to date. The key objective tackled in this paper can be defined as the identification of the city logistics schemes with highlighting current approaches in smart cities. The study adopts a systemic approach based on the typology of consolidation-distribution schemes in city logistics to define the feasibility of micro logistics initiatives from the scope of the smart city consisting of mobility, sustainability, and liveability. Thanks to a detailed examination of city logistics dynamics, this study can contribute theoretically to smart city logistics literature as well as practically the logistics sector.


2021 ◽  
pp. 103448
Author(s):  
Senthil Murugan Nagarajan ◽  
Ganesh Gopal Deverajan ◽  
Puspita Chatterjee ◽  
Waleed Alnumay ◽  
V. Muthukumaran

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document