by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Urban freight transportation encompasses freight vehicles whose primary purpose is to carry goods into, out of, and within urban areas. For the city inhabitants, it supplies stores and places of work and leisure, delivers goods at home, provides the means to eliminate waste, etc. It forms a vital link for firms with suppliers and customers …
Growing urbanization, climate change, and the increasing use of home delivery require new ideas on how to solve transportation-related problems in urban areas. The cargo bike, once a common mode of transport, played a minor role in the last decades of motorization. Yet, the cargo bike is ideally suited for inner-city transportation. It is quiet, …
Parking is a necessary component of traditional last-mile delivery practices, but finding parking can be difficult. Yet, the routing literature largely does not account for the need to find parking. In a new paper by Reed et.al., the researchers address this challenge of finding parking through the Capacitated Delivery Problem with Parking (CDPP). Including the …
Routing electric commercial vehicles requires taking into account their limited driving range, which is affected by several uncertain factors such as traffic conditions. presents the time-dependent Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Chance-Constraints (EVRP-CC) and partial recharging.
Online customers expect faster delivery. Last-mile logistics operators normally deliver goods on the same day that they receive them at their local facilities, creating the challenge of planning delivery routes while simultaneously receiving new requests. Once delivery vehicles have started their routes, these operators commonly employ two strategies to manage the arrival of new orders: dispatch …
Picnic delivers e-groceries to thousands of customers every day. To do so both efficiently and effectively, Picnic’s distribution system needs to be as smooth as possible. One part of this system is the vehicle routing model, which determines which routes are optimal given the customers and their placed orders, amongst other factors. An important input …
In previous decades the postal sector experienced drastic changes. Liberalization and digitization resulted in a continuous mail market decline. Simultaneously the booming e-commerce parcel delivery market requires Postal Operators (POs) to rigorously restructure their delivery networks to reduce distribution costs. POs are evaluating synergy opportunities between the mail and parcel delivery network.
Completing urban freight deliveries is increasingly a challenge in congested urban areas, particularly when delivery trucks are required to meet time windows. Depending on the route characteristics, cargo bikes may serve as an economically viable alternative to delivery trucks.
Florian Arnold from the University of Antwerp developed an algorithm that enables efficient parcel delivery with cargo bikes. According to Arnold, this is more environmentally friendly and not more expensive than with vans.
Availability of loading and unloading zones is critical for reducing urban transport times and costs of last mile operations, improving planning, as well as for improving city sustainability, road safety, and livability.