Policy approaches for placing parcel lockers in public space

This paper explores policy approaches for parcel lockers in public space. While last- mile delivery service providers primarily focus on the economic and customer service benefits of parcel lockers, securing approval from local governments to place lockers in public spaces requires justification of their public value. Our study identifies six factors that decisionmakers can consider when evaluating requests for parcel locker placement: carbon emissions, nuisances of the delivery vehicle, nuisances at a locker location, customer preferences, innovation, and the pull effect of parcel lockers. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and a workshop with public decisionmakers in cities across the Netherlands and Europe, we find that delivery vehicle nuisances and potential new nuisances at the locker location are important factors for decisionmakers at local government. Our study reveals two distinct approaches taken by local governments when facing requests for parcel locker placement in public spaces: reactive and proactive. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of the policy perspective on parcel lockers in public spaces and provides insights for sustainable urban logistics planning

Milk-run routing problem with progress-lane in the collection of automobile parts

In recent years, the automotive industry has faced an unprecedented crisis. In particular, the zero-inventory approach, which has been widely pursued by many automobile companies, seems to be impractical in some real production contexts since it requires an inventory of all parts but in low amounts. In this paper, we investigate a new logistics method which collects automobile parts by integrating the progress-lane (P-LANE) into the corresponding vehicle routing problem. We propose a mixed integer programming formulation for this new model, which can simultaneously determines the trip routes to collect automobile parts, as well as the P-LANE that each collected part should be assigned to, so as to minimize the total costs of the production and inbound logistics. The comparison with the zero-inventory model shows that the use of the P-LANE within the milk-run system could significantly decrease the total costs and also improve the transportation efficiency. To be specific, for small and large size instances, the total costs of the zero-inventory model are about 10% and 30% higher than the ones with P-LANE, respectively, which suggests that the periodic part collection model with P-LANE could be more appropriate for automobile manufacturing

Parcel lockers vs. home delivery: a model to compare last-mile delivery cost in urban and rural areas

Purpose This paper investigates the economic performances of two business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce last-mile delivery options -parcel lockers (PLs) and traditional home delivery (HD) in contexts where e-commerce is still at its early stages. It analyses and compares two different implementation contexts, urban and rural areas. Design/methodology/approach This study develops an analytical model that estimates delivery costs for both the PL and HD options. The model is applied to two base cases (representative of urban and rural areas in Italy), and sensitivity analyses are subsequently performed on a set of key variables/parameters (i.e. PL density, PL fill rate and PL annual costs). To support the model development and application, interviews with practitioners (Edwards et al., 2011) were performed. Findings PLs imply lower delivery cost than HD, independently from the implementation area (urban or rural): advantages mainly derive from the higher delivery density and the drastic reduction of failed deliveries. Benefits entailed by PLs are more significant in rural areas due to lower PL investments and annual costs, as well as higher HD costs. Originality/value This paper offers insights to both academics and practitioners. On the academic side, it develops a model to compare the delivery cost of PL and HD, which includes the analysis of urban and rural contexts. This could serve as a platform for developing/informing future analytical/optimisation contributions. On the managerial side, it may support practitioners in making decisions about the implementation of PLs and HD, to benchmark their costs and to identify the main variables and parameters at play

Dynamic planning of mobile service teams’ mission subject to orders uncertainty constraints

This paper considers the dynamic vehicle routing problem where a fleet of vehicles deals with periodic deliveries of goods or services to spatially dispersed customers over a given time horizon. Individual customers may only be served by predefined (dedicated) suppliers. Each vehicle follows a pre-planned separate route linking points defined by the customer location and service periods when ordered deliveries are carried out. Customer order specifications and their services time windows as well as vehicle travel times are dynamically recognized over time. The objective is to maximize a number of newly introduced or modified requests, being submitted dynamically throughout the assumed time horizon, but not compromising already considered orders. Therefore, the main question is whether a newly reported delivery request or currently modified/corrected one can be accepted or not. The considered problem arises, for example, in systems in which garbage collection or DHL parcel deliveries as well as preventive maintenance requests are scheduled and implemented according to a cyclically repeating sequence. It is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem implementing the ordered fuzzy number formalism enabling to handle the fuzzy nature of variables through an algebraic approach. Computational results show that the proposed solution outperforms commonly used computer simulation methods

A new bi-objective model of the urban public transportation hub network design under uncertainty

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