ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic and movement control order that started in 2020 has changed the shopping behavior to online shopping. This also increases in-home delivery services by the shipping providers. However, since the virus can be transmitted through surface transmission, the buyer is advised to avoid touching surfaces and clean or sanitize surfaces regularly with standard disinfectants to prevent the spread. In addition, with an increase in the parcel delivery process, missing parcels also will be one of the main problems that the buyer will be facing. This study has developed a smart parcel box with sanitizer to overcome the issues stated above. Smart in this context refers to the notification that the buyer will get once the parcel is placed inside the parcel box, the box itself will be locked once the parcel is in and only can be opened by the authorized user. This study utilizes the Arduino IDE software to control the operation of the locks and notifications. The notifications are linked to the Blynk Application that needs to be installed on the buyer's smartphone. The software is also coded to run the motor that controls the standard disinfectants that will be sprayed on the parcel for a few seconds. The results indicate one solution for the online shopping addicts to shop while avoiding the spread of COVID-19 viruses. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Globalisation, urbanisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been raising the demand for logistic activities. This change is affecting the entire supply chain, especially the last-mile step. This step is considered the most expensive and ineffective part of the supply chain and a source of negative economic, environmental and social externalities. This article aims to characterise the sustainable urban last-mile logistics research field through a systematic literature review (N = 102). This wide and holistic review was organised into six thematic clusters that identified the main concepts addressed in the different areas of the last-mile research and the existence of 14 solutions, grouped into three types (vehicular, operational, and organisational solutions). The major findings are that there are no ideal last-mile solutions as their limitations should be further explored by considering the so-called "triple bottom line of sustainability”;the integration and combination of multiple last-mile alternative concepts;or by establishing collaboration schemes that minimise the stakeholders' conflicting interests. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
In the last decade, e-commerce has been growing consistently. Fostered by the covid pandemic, online retail has grown exponentially, particularly in industries including food, clothing, groceries, and many others. This growth in online retailing activities has raised critical logistic challenges, especially in the last leg of the distribution, commonly referred to as the Last Mile. For instance, traditional truck-based home delivery has reached its limit within metropolitan areas and can no longer be an effective delivery method. Driven by technological progress, several other logistic solutions have been deployed as innovative alternatives to deliver parcels. This includes delivery by drones, smart parcel stations, robots, and crowdsourcing, among others. In this setting, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the latest trends in last-mile delivery solutions from both industry and academic perspectives (see Figure 1 for overview). We use a content analysis literature review to analyse over 80 relevant publications, derive the necessary features of the latest innovation in the last mile delivery, and point out their different maturity levels and the related theoretical and operational challenges. (Figure presented.). © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Due to COVID-19, ordering food through online shopping increased. Accordingly, the use of logistics and delivery services is also increasing. As the number of parcels to be delivered gets bigger, the efficiency of the delivery mechanism and battery efficiency becomes important. The problem of finding the route traveling several destinations at once is called as Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). There are several algorithms suggested to solve it in polynomial time. Among them, this paper experimented to compare the performance of two algorithms, the greedy algorithm, and the branch-and-bound algorithm. We used the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) program to test the vehicle running based on the calculated route by two algorithms. The average running time and charging time are recorded to evaluate the performance. Through this experiment, we found out that the branch-and-bound algorithm provides in a faster route selection and consumes less battery than the greedy algorithm. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic calls for contactless deliveries. To prevent the further spread of the disease and ensure the timely delivery of supplies, this paper investigates a collaborative truck-drone routing problem for contactless parcel delivery (CRP-T&D), which allows multiple trucks and multiple drones to deliver parcels cooperatively in epidemic areas. We formulate a mixed-integer programming model that minimizes the delivery time, with the consideration of the energy consumption model of drones. To solve CRP-T&D, we develop an improved variable neighborhood descent (IVND) that combines the Metropolis acceptance criterion of Simulated Annealing (SA) and the tabu list of Tabu Search (TS). Meanwhile, the integration of K-means clustering and Nearest neighbor strategy is applied to generate the initial solution. To evaluate the performance of IVND, experiments are conducted by comparing IVND with VND, SA, TS, variants of VND, and large neighborhood search (LNS) on instances with different scales. Several critical factors are tested to verify the robustness of IVND. Moreover, the experimental results on a practical instance further demonstrate the superior performance of IVND. IEEE
ABSTRACT
The ever-increasing impacts of the last mile delivery sector on the environment and the quality of life of the urban population, such as increased congestion, demand best practices to be incorporated by companies to reduce impacts such as emission of air pollutants and Greenhouse Gases (GHG) and depletion of natural resources, among others. However, a myriad of strategies has been developed for this purpose but there is a lack of methodologies that allow the choice of the best ones for a specific case. Therefore, this study looks for those best practices to be employed through an innovative methodology that consists of SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), a map of strategies of the delivery service, and using the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), with the differential of considering the peculiarities of each company. The results applied in a Brazilian last mile delivery service company show that best practices such as route optimization, implementation of new infrastructure and business models for urban deliveries, and use of information systems for fleet tracking and monitoring contribute significantly to improving performance indicators and achieving the sector’s goal to become more sustainable, and especially meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 8, 9, 11, and 17.
ABSTRACT
This study focuses on safety measures in B2C delivery chains, particularly during last-mile delivery in COVID pandemic times. We observe that in this context delivery workers provide the necessary resilience to the consumer market, yet owing to lack of risk awareness and low wages they may not have incentives to value and manage safety risks properly. We have therefore investigated public and market regulation for possible remedies for this problem. Our research concludes that delivery risks are currently overlooked in EU road transport regulations. Furthermore, the necessary sector transparency that would allow compliance control is equally missing. We have found that the parcel delivery and on-demand delivery sectors also do not provide any special safety measures. The companies do not go beyond recommendations and guidelines and indicate no compliance controls. Some solutions are offered by mandatory contract law, which could provide retailers and consumers with the tools needed to enforce safe delivery in the contract chain. Nevertheless, since there are no explicit contractual obligations, legal uncertainty remains. Our main recommendation is for greater transparency in B2C delivery chains with new or amended regulations, increased reporting obligations and market regulation. All these should be underpinned by optimising digitised data flows in contract chains, which can be achieved by a data pipeline connecting all stakeholders in the delivery chain.
ABSTRACT
In March 2020, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee, and the International Olympic Committee postponed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for one year. The delay is the most prominent consequence of the COVID-19 crisis in Japan thus far. But the "Corona Calamity" (korona ka) is bigger than the Olympics. The totality of the disaster is impossible to capture. The very thing that makes it a calamity are the myriad rhythms of crisis that intersect at COVID-19. If there is a shared theme to be found in these rhythms, it is the question of recovery. When will it happen? What will it look like? And what, exactly, will we recover? In what follows, I share three rhythms of crisis and recovery: national history, the tourism industry, and the parcel delivery industry.