Combining crowdsourcing and mapping customer behaviour in last-mile deliveries

In the light of the dramatic rise of online sales, last-mile deliveries (i.e., the delivery of products ordered online to the final customer) have been increasingly gaining the attention of both managers and academics. As a matter of fact, they are very critical in terms of effectiveness (as customers demand fast and accurate deliveries), and efficiency (since they imply very high costs). Henceforth, logistics players operating in the B2C e-commerce environment are striving to find and implement innovative solutions, different from the costly traditional by-van home deliveries. Among the options analysed by scholars so far, two promising ones are crowdsourcing logistics (i.e., outsourcing delivery activities to “common” people) and mapping the behaviour of customers (i.e., analysing the probability distribution of the customer presence at home and accordingly scheduling deliveries to minimise the probability of failed deliveries). In this paper, we introduce and study a combination between the two solutions, proposing a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem, which considers both the Availability Profiles and Occasional Drivers (VRPAPOD). We model the delivery problem as a mixed-integer program and solve it with a branch-and-price algorithm. To analyse the benefit of the combined use of crowdshipping and customers availability profiles (APs), we conduct several experiments in a real context in the city of Milan, randomly extracting 100 customers in a 16 km2 area. The combined solution is compared with two benchmarking models, namely the traditional home delivery (traditional VRP) and the crowdsourcing logistics option (Vehicle Routing Problem with Occasional Drivers (VRPOD)). Results prove that logistics players can achieve important benefits by relying on the crowd and scheduling deliveries according to clients' APs, which become more significant in case of high drivers availability

Truck-based drone delivery system: An economic and environmental assessment

Innovative solutions for last-mile delivery have sparked great interest among consumers and logistics operators. The combination of new technologies with existing ones can lead to new possible last-mile delivery configurations, among which truck-drone joint delivery is one of the most promising. This paper evaluates the environmental and economic sustainability of a last-mile delivery solution involving electric trucks equipped with drones, and it provides a comparison with traditional logistics systems. The comparative life cycle assessment methodology is used to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions per parcel delivered. The total cost of ownership methodology is adopted for the economic analysis. Results suggest that the truck-drone alternative leads to significant emissions reductions, while its cost performance is primarily affected by the drone automation level

Advanced crew procedures development techniques

The development of an operational computer program, the Procedures and Performance Program (PPP), is reported which provides a procedures recording and crew/vehicle performance monitoring capability. The PPP provides real time CRT displays and postrun hardcopy of procedures, difference procedures, performance, performance evaluation, and training script/training status data. During post-run, the program is designed to support evaluation through the reconstruction of displays to any point in time. A permanent record of the simulation exercise can be obtained via hardcopy output of the display data, and via magnetic tape transfer to the Generalized Documentation Processor (GDP). Reference procedures data may be transferred from the GDP to the PPP

Crew procedures development techniques

The study developed requirements, designed, developed, checked out and demonstrated the Procedures Generation Program (PGP). The PGP is a digital computer program which provides a computerized means of developing flight crew procedures based on crew action in the shuttle procedures simulator. In addition, it provides a real time display of procedures, difference procedures, performance data and performance evaluation data. Reconstruction of displays is possible post-run. Data may be copied, stored on magnetic tape and transferred to the document processor for editing and documentation distribution

The RainBO Platform for Enhancing Urban Resilience to Floods: An Ecient Tool for Planning and Emergency Phases

Many urban areas face an increasing flood risk, which includes the risk of flash floods. Increasing extreme precipitation events will likely lead to greater human and economic losses unless reliable and efficient early warning systems (EWS) along with other adaptation actions are put in place in urban areas. The challenge is in the integration and analysis in time and space of the environmental, meteorological, and territorial data from multiple sources needed to build up EWS able to provide efficient contribution to increase the resilience of vulnerable and exposed urban communities to flooding. Efficient EWS contribute to the preparedness phase of the disaster cycle but could also be relevant in the planning of the emergency phase. The RainBO Life project addressed this matter, focusing on the improvement of knowledge, methods, and tools for the monitoring and forecast of extreme precipitation events and the assessment of the associated flood risk for small and medium watercourses in urban areas. To put this into practice, RainBO developed a webGIS platform, which contributes to the “planning” of the management of river flood events through the use of detailed data and flood risk/vulnerability maps, and the “event management” with real-time monitoring/forecast of the events through the collection of observed data from real sensors, estimated/forecasted data from hydrologic models as well as qualitative data collected through a crowdsourcing app

Nano-structured magnetic metamaterial with enhanced nonlinear properties

Nano-structuring can significantly modify the properties of materials. We demonstrate that size-dependent modification of the spin-wave spectra in magnetic nano-particles can affect not only linear, but also nonlinear magnetic response. The discretization of the spectrum removes the frequency degeneracy between the main excitation mode of a nano-particle and the higher spin-wave modes, having the lowest magnetic damping, and reduces the strength of multi-magnon relaxation processes. This reduction of magnon-magnon relaxation for the main excitation mode leads to a dramatic increase of its lifetime and amplitude, resulting in the intensification of all the nonlinear processes involving this mode. We demonstrate this experimentally on a two-dimensional array of permalloy nano-dots for the example of parametric generation of a sub-harmonic of an external microwave signal. The characteristic lifetime of this sub-harmonic is increased by two orders of magnitude compared to the case of a continuous magnetic film, where magnon-magnon relaxation limits the lifetime