ABSTRACT
The recent rise of e-commerce, accelerated significantly by the covid-19 pandemic, sifted consumer behaviors and expectations towards retail and imposed enormous pressure on the areas of reliability, punctuality and expedition of goods at the last mile. This sudden attention to the last-mile leg of the freight transport, revealed the challenges of the sector, which proved to be unprepared and incapable of managing the unprecedented demand. This opened-up new opportunities for the development of innovative, technology-driven, last-mile distribution solutions that aim at efficient, cost-effective and less polluting logistics operations. This paper presents a technology-driven solution for the optimization of logistics operations and solving the same day delivery problem. The solution is being developed as part of an on-demand service for last-mile distribution, and will be applied in real-life operations in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. © 2022 ACM.