Collaborative last-mile delivery and pick-up in city logistics

Abstract

Collaborative strategy helps city planner and logistics companies to plan for last-mile delivery and pick-up strategy such that it reduces fuel consumption and thus pollution within the city. This paper proposes a mathematical model to evaluate fuel consumption for a routing plan in last-mile delivery (or pick-up) for non-collaborative (or traditional) and collaborative strategy. Comparing both the scenario for last-mile delivery and pick-up, the latter strategy outperforms the former with 19.02% reduction in fuel consumption. Results are also analysed in terms of total carbon emission caused by vehicles of individual companies. Sharing of surplus among the companies due to collaborative strategy is also presented in this study. Furthermore, the paper assesses the implementation of an electric fleet of vehicles in the context of collaborative urban transportation of goods and determines corresponding energy consumption. The results exhibit an improvement of 24.16% in electric vehicles (EVs) in a collaborative scenario compared to diesel vehicles. Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.