A Clustering Based Routing Heuristic for Last-Mile Logistics in Fresh Food E-Commerce

Abstract

This study considers the fresh food city logistics that involves the last-mile distribution of commodities to the customer locations from the local distribution centres (LDCs) established by the e-commerce firms. In this scenario, the last-mile logistics is crucial for its speed of response and the effectiveness in distribution of packages to the target destinations. We propose a clustering-based routing heuristic (CRH) to manage the vehicle routing for the last-mile logistic operations of fresh food in e-commerce. CRH is a clustering algorithm that performs repetitive clustering of demand nodes until the nodes within each cluster become serviceable by a single vehicle. The computational complexity of the algorithm is reduced due to the downsizing of the network through clustering and, hence, produces an optimum feasible solution in less computational time. The algorithm performance was analysed using various operating scenarios and satisfactory results were obtained.