Abstract
High distribution costs constitute one of the major obstacles to the sustainable development of rural logistics. In order to effectively reduce the distribution costs of last mile delivery in rural areas, based on three typical transport modes (local logistics providers, public transport, and crowdsourcing logistics), this study first proposes a multimodal transport design for last mile delivery in rural areas. Then, a cost–benefit model for multimodal transport is proposed which uses genetic algorithms (GA) to solve the logistical problems faced. Finally, Shapley value is used to fairly allocate profits and represent the marginal contribution of each mode in multimodal transport. The numerical results show that multimodal transport can effectively reduce the distribution costs of last mile delivery in rural areas. When the order demand of each node tends to be stable, the marginal contribution of crowdsourcing logistics is often greater than that of the other two distribution modes. The marginal contribution of public transport is highest only when the number of orders per node is very small.
Highlights
In recent years, the continuous development of e-commerce business has driven the rapid development of rural logistics
Multimodal transport for last mile delivery in rural areas has not been widely accepted by the general public due to poor coordination among transport modes and difficulties in terms of cost–benefit analyses
This paper first allocates the distribution orders among three transport modes according to the specified strategy, which reduces the complexity of the route optimization problem to a certain extent
Summary
The continuous development of e-commerce business has driven the rapid development of rural logistics. According to a report [1], in the first three quarters of 2021, China’s online retail sales reached 1.441 trillion dollars, up 18.5% year on year. Rural e-commerce business continued to grow; in the first three quarters of. 2021, rural online retail sales registered 224.1 billion dollars, up by 16.3%. Rural logistics is still backward, and the development of rural logistics faces many problems, such as low information levels, poor distribution service quality, small distribution network ranges, long distribution times, and so on. These problems lead to the high distribution costs of last mile delivery in rural areas and hinder the further development of rural logistics
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