Search Results (4)

Background: The growth of parcel volumes in urban areas, largely driven by e-commerce, has increased the complexity of pickup and delivery operations. To meet demands for cost efficiency, flexibility, and sustainability, CEP (Courier, Express, and Parcel) operators increasingly outsource segments of their last-mile networks. Methods: This study proposes a novel multidimensional cost model for outsourcing, integrating five key variables: transport unit type (parcel/pallet), service phase (pickup/delivery), vehicle category, powertrain type, and delivery point type. The model applies correction coefficients based on internal operational costs, further adjusted for location and service quality using a bonus/malus mechanism. Results: Each cost component is calculated independently, enabling full transparency and route-level cost tracking. A real-world case study was conducted using operational data from a CEP operator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The model demonstrated improved accuracy and fairness in cost allocation, with measurable savings of up to 7% compared to existing fixed-price models. Conclusions: The proposed model supports data-driven outsourcing decisions, allows tailored cost structuring based on operational realities, and aligns with sustainable last-mile delivery strategies. It offers a scalable and adaptable tool for CEP operators seeking to enhance cost control and service efficiency in complex urban environments. Full article

Increasing popularity in gig employment has enabled the use of an at-will workforce of self-contracted couriers to participate in many service industries serving urban areas. This gig workforce has come to play a particularly important role in the growing meal delivery service industry. Hiring at-will couriers for delivery job fulfillment can decrease the costs of satisfying nonstationary demand. However, at-will workers can show up for work at their will and without notice. Thus, this puts the service performance of the delivery company that relies on effective workforce management to ensure timely delivery of orders at risk. This work investigates the tradeoffs between using such an at-will workforce of couriers in place of a fixed fleet of drivers in servicing a meal delivery environment. A stochastic DES with tabu search heuristic and embedded ejection chain approach for optimal delivery job bundling, routing, and assignment was developed and run within a rolling horizon framework to replicate the dynamics of the meal delivery setting. Condition Value at Risk (CVaR) is adopted to measure the risk of late delivery due to uncertainty in workforce availability. Results from a numerical case study with 25 restaurants and 613 orders arriving over a 14-h period show tradeoffs from using at-will couriers in place of a comparable fixed fleet of drivers in terms of delivery resource utilization, efficiency risk of failing to satisfying orders and risk of significantly late delivery. Results indicate that using at-will couriers for meal delivery can enable more efficient use of delivery resources, but at the cost of a higher risk of late delivery, and sometimes intolerably late delivery, as compared to using a fixed fleet of drivers to fulfill orders. Full article

The transition from diesel-driven urban freight transport towards more electric urban freight transport turns out to be challenging in practice. A major concern for transport operators is how to find a reliable charging strategy for a larger electric vehicle fleet that provides flexibility based on different daily mission profiles within that fleet, while also minimizing costs. This contribution assesses the trade-off between a large battery pack and opportunity charging with regard to costs and operational constraints. Based on a case study with 39 electric freight vehicles that have been used by a parcel delivery company and a courier company in daily operations for over a year, various scenarios have been analyzed by means of a TCO analysis. Although a large battery allows for more flexibility in planning, opportunity charging can provide a feasible alternative, especially in the case of varying mission profiles. Additional personnel costs during opportunity charging can be avoided as much as possible by a well-integrated charging strategy, which can be realized by a reservation system that minimizes the risk of occupied charging stations and a dense network of charging stations. Full article

Delivery service sharing (DSS) has made an important contribution in the optimization of daily order delivery applications. Existing DSS algorithms introduce two major limitations. First, due to computational reasons, most DSS algorithms focus on the fixed pickup/drop-off time scenario, which is inconvenient for real-world scenarios where customers can choose the pickup/drop-off time flexibly. On the other hand, to address the intractable DSS with the flexible time windows (DSS-Fle), local search-based heuristics are widely employed; however, they have no theoretical results on the advantage of order sharing. Against this background, this paper designs a novel algorithm for DSS-Fle, which is efficient on both time complexity and system throughput. Inspired by the efficiency of shareability network on the delivery service routing (DSR) variant where orders cannot be shared and have the fixed time window, we first consider the variant of DSR with flexible time windows (DSR-Fle). For DSR-Fle, the order’s flexible time windows are split into multiple virtual fixed time windows, one of which is chosen by the shareability network as the order’s service time. On the other hand, inspired by efficiency of local search heuristics, we further consider the variant of DSS with fixed time window (DSS-Fix). For DSS-Fix, the beneficial sharing orders are searched and inserted to the shareability network. Finally, combining the spitting mechanism proposed in DSR-Fle and the inserting mechanism proposed in DSS-Fix together, an efficient algorithm is proposed for DSS-Fle. Simulation results show that the proposed DSS-Fle variant algorithm can scale to city-scale scenarios with thousands of regions, orders and couriers, and has the significant advantage on improving system throughput. Full article