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 …
The growth in e-commerce that our society has faced in recent years is changing the view companies have on last-mile logistics due to its increasing impact on the whole supply chain. In addition, new technologies are raising users’ expectations with the need to develop customized delivery experiences; moreover, increasing pressure on supply chains has also …
The market for vehicle routing and scheduling and last-mile applications continues to grow as organizations are seeking ways to optimize fleet operations. Gartner presents a market guide. Last-mile delivery solutions are an evolution of VRS, grown due to the huge increase in e-commerce and last-mile operations. Whereas traditional routing solutions focused primarily on fleets and movements …
Urban deliveries are subject to many access restrictions which creates the need to establish a system of loading bays and to split the last mile delivery into driving and walking parts. A new model based on hard and soft clustering approach is developed by Letnik et. al. to solve the loading bay assignment problem for …
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.
What do designing an aircraft wing, packing boxes into a container, and making timetables have in common? They’re all optimization problems, according to Picnic blogger Geert Konijnendijk: “there’s an objective to be maximized or minimized (least air resistance, most boxes packed or least man-hours spent). Each individual solution to these problems will have a score …
Digital technology advancement has been changing grocery retailing customers’ behavior and expectations. Enabled by digital technologies and pleased by the digital disruptors, customers are expecting convenient online shopping and fast delivery. To retain their loyalty, retailers are forced to provide better services through digital transformation.
During the International City Logistics Conference 2019 Matthew J. Roorda (University of Toronto) presented his research on vehicle routing problems (VRP) with movement synchronization of drones, sidewalk robots, or foot-walkers (the ‘driver helper’). The VRP extension with movement synchronization (VRPMS) has potential applications of drone and robot technologies to assist with the delivery of parcels.
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.