Last-mile delivery efficiency: <i>en route transloading</i> in the parcel delivery industry
Juan David Cortes, Yoshinori Suzuki
Abstract
In the last few years, many consumers have shifted their shopping locations from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to online shopping sites to take advantage of larger product selections and convenient delivery services. This has forced parcel delivery service providers, such as UPS and FedEx, to handle large amounts of shipments with complex delivery needs in a time-efficient manner. Given this challenge, parcel delivery companies are looking for faster, more cost-efficient ways to distribute parcels. Based on expert opinions, obtained through a series of interviews with practitioners, this study presents a decision tool to improve the operational efficiency of last-mile delivery for parcel delivery companies. This decision tool extends previous works on Vehicle Routing Problem with Split Deliveries by allowing shipment transloading to take place between vehicles at select points (other than the depot) in the logistics network, within pre-specified time windows.