Community logistics: a dynamic strategy for facilitating immediate parcel delivery to smart lockers

ABSTRACT

The COVID Pandemic since early 2019 has imposed significant effects on our life. In the retail and logistics sector, the large-scale national lockdown has drastically driven e-commerce sales because the e-marketplace has become the only sales channel. Whilst the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards a more digital world and led to an irreversible dependence on e-commerce retailing, the pressure is on retailers and logistics service providers to respond to the growing demand for immediate delivery in the e-commerce era. Given the integration of smart lockers into developing a more favourable environment which potentially makes immediate delivery more feasible, this paper introduces a novel, dynamic delivery strategy, namely Community Logistics Strategy (CLS), for formulating and updating the new delivery plan in real time as new delivery requests to smart lockers arrive. To shed light on the effect of dynamic order arrival towards delivery planning, the CLS attempts to update the delivery plan by taking new requests into account in real time. Simulation results reveal the superiority of the proposed strategy in managing e-commerce delivery requests, especially within megacities where consumers are highly dense in a compact geographical area.