Optimization of parcel delivery in the last-mile

The last few years have seen an increase in e-commerce activities throughout the world. Coupled with the recent COVID-19 containment measures in the last two years, more consumers in cities and urban regions prefer online purchases over visits to physical stores. Online sales and delivery platforms such as UberEats, Alibaba, Amazon, and MeiTuan have registered increased sales each day (Schwerdfeger and Boysen, 2020). The delivery of these services to the consumers is consistent with the last-mile problems, which entail the transportation of goods from identified nodes to the customers, as formulated in the vehicle routing problem model (Tilk, Olkis, and Irnich, 2020). However, more vehicles are required to bridge the gap in last-mile services to the customers in cities, which creates the problem of congestion and pollution.

Recently, there have been attempts to implement sustainability initiatives to mitigate issues due to vehicle routing problems. One such solution is the adoption of the green vehicle routing problem model, as opposed to the traditional vehicle routing problem model. The adoption of the green vehicle routing problem model is in line with the need to lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the cities by 60 percent in 2050 (Perboli and Rosano, 2019). Moreover, the optimisation of last-mile services through the adoption of the green vehicle routing problem bears the potential to raise vehicle energy efficiency through the implementation of sustainable technology for clean transport (Schwerdfeger and Boysen, 2020). It includes the use of cargo bikes, electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, or drones.