Freight-on-Transit for Urban Last-Mile Deliveries: A Strategic Planning Approach

34 Pages Posted: 9 Mar 2022

See all articles by Diego Delle Donne

Diego Delle Donne

ESSEC Business School

Laurent Alfandari

ESSEC Business School - Information & Decision Sciences Department

Claudia Archetti

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Ivana Ljubic

ESSEC Business School

Date Written: November 24, 2021

Abstract

We study a delivery strategy for last-mile deliveries in urban areas which combines freight transportation with mass mobility systems with the goal of creating synergies contrasting negative externalities caused by transportation. The idea is to use the residual capacity on public transport means for moving freights within the city. In particular, the system is such that parcels are first transported from origins (central distribution centers) to drop-in stations, which are stop locations on public vehicles itineraries.Then, they are transported through public vehicles to drop-out stations, from where they are delivered to destination by freighters using green vehicles (such as bikes, drones, porters, etc.). The system is known as Freight-On-Transit (FOT). In this paper, we focus on the strategic decisions related to defining the public transportation network that will take part to the delivery system, i.e., which public vehicle lines and stop locations will be included (and thus equipped for the service). We propose different formulations for the problem and effective heuristic solution approaches based on column generation. We perform exhaustive tests aimed at providing managerial insights on the performance and the efficiency of the system.

Keywords: freight-on-transit, network flow, column generation, mixed integer linear programming

Suggested Citation

Delle Donne, Diego and Alfandari, Laurent and Archetti, Claudia and Ljubic, Ivana, Freight-on-Transit for Urban Last-Mile Deliveries: A Strategic Planning Approach (November 24, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4006625 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4006625

Diego Delle Donne (Contact Author)

ESSEC Business School ( email )

3 Avenue Bernard Hirsch
CS 50105 CERGY
CERGY, CERGY PONTOISE CEDEX 95021
France

Laurent Alfandari

ESSEC Business School - Information & Decision Sciences Department ( email )

Avenue Bernard Hirsch B.P. 50105
Cergy-Pontoise (Paris), 95021
France

Claudia Archetti

affiliation not provided to SSRN ( email )

Ivana Ljubic

ESSEC Business School ( email )

3 Avenue Bernard Hirsch
CS 50105 CERGY
CERGY, CERGY PONTOISE CEDEX 95021
France

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