Adapting retail supply chains for the race to sustainable urban delivery

Abstract

To deal with urban distribution challenges, companies are redesigning their distribution networks. This paper studies a two-echelon vehicle routing problem, one of the most employed models, with a heterogeneous fleet between echelons. Vehicles in the first echelon are mobile satellites that supply the vehicles in the second echelon. Our study aims to minimize the travel time. To solve this complex problem when facing real-life distribution, a heuristic solution approach is followed by decomposing the components of the problem and applying the well-known nearest neighbor procedure. This approach is also justified by the very large amount of delivery points, so the problem dataset can be computationally tractable. Experiments are run using real data from a delivery company in Paris, France. Different scenarios are evaluated, and results show that the consideration of cargo bikes has big potential to reduce some of the externalities caused by conventional delivery systems, while some non-intuitive impacts are also found, such as the increase in land use. © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.