Coping with the rise of E-commerce generated home deliveries through innovative last-mile technologies and strategies

E-commerce has the potential to make urban goods flow economically viable,
environmentally efficient, and socially equitable. However, as e-retailers
compete with increasingly consumer-focused services, urban freight
witnesses a significant increase in associated distribution costs and
negative externalities particularly affecting those living close to
logistics clusters. Hence, to remain competitive, e-retailers deploy
alternate last-mile distribution strategies. These alternate strategies,
such as those that include use of electric delivery trucks for last-mile
operations, a fleet of crowdsourced drivers for last-mile delivery,
consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a
multi-echelon distribution, or collection points for customer pickup, can
restore sustainable urban goods flow. Thus, in this study, the authors
investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with such
alternate last-mile distribution strategies for an e-retailer offering
expedited service with rush delivery within strict timeframes. To this
end, the authors formulate a last-mile network design (LMND) problem as a
dynamic-stochastic two-echelon capacitated location routing problem with
time-windows (DS-2E-C-LRP-TW) addressed with an adaptive large
neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic.