Abstract
In the wake of e-commerce and its successful diffusion in most commercial activities, last-mile distribution causes more and more trouble in urban areas all around the globe. Growing parcel volumes to be delivered toward customer homes increase the number of delivery vans entering the city centers and thus add to congestion, pollution, and negative health impact. Therefore, it is anything but surprising that in recent years many novel delivery concepts on the last mile have been innovated. Among the most prominent are unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and autonomous delivery robots taking over parcel delivery. This paper surveys established and novel last-mile concepts and puts special emphasis on the decision problems to be solved when setting up and operating each concept. To do so, we systematically record the alternative delivery concepts in a compact notation scheme, discuss the most important decision problems, and survey existing research on operations research methods solving these problems. Furthermore, we elaborate promising future research avenues.
Highlights
Last-mile delivery, i.e., all logistics activities related to the delivery of shipments to private customer households in urban areas, is a hot topic in cities all over the globe
There are quite a few competing definitions of last-mile delivery, but a widely agreed understanding is that the term refers to all those logistics activities related to the distribution of shipments, e.g., parcels with goods ordered online, to private customer households in urban areas
The large overview table that specifies the delivery concept investigated, the decision problem treated, and the solution method applied by each surveyed paper is given in “Appendix.” In spite of the large number of papers listed there, it can be concluded that the multitude of alternative last-mile delivery concepts still requires a lot of additional research effort
Summary
Last-mile delivery, i.e., all logistics activities related to the delivery of shipments to private customer households in urban areas, is a hot topic in cities all over the globe. Aging workforce The aging workforce in many industrialized countries enlarges the problem of employers hiring the required manpower (Otto et al 2017), especially in a physically demanding environment such as parcel delivery where the press frequently reports on harsh occupational conditions and low payments, e.g., Peterson (2018) In such a work environment, alternative delivery concepts less dependent on human work but on automation seem a promising alternative for the future. With self-service concepts based on parcel lockers or automated delivery options based on unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) or autonomous delivery robots, this final human interaction gets lost Given these challenges and the recent (and ongoing) technological developments, such as autonomous driving, drones, and delivery robots, it is anything but surprising that plenty of novel last-mile delivery concepts have been promoted during the recent years.
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