Mobile home delivery parcel lockers

Abstract

The demand for last-mile parcel delivery services is expected to increase. Great efforts are therefore being made to develop new ideas for more efficient last-mile delivery. One of the more recent concepts are Mobile Parcel Lockers (MPL), which can be easily repositioned to meet the actual daily demand for deliveries. In this work, we introduce the Mobile Home Delivery Parcel Locker (MHDPL) problem. Therein, a single vehicle can provide both, MPL service and Attended Home Deliveries (AHD), the current industry standard. Hence, the MHDPL problem integrates two characteristics: the simultaneous delivery of many customers as with MPLs, and the delivery of particularly remote customers in a short time as with AHDs. We present a mathematical formulation and propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) as a solution approach. Since our ILS works on a time-space network, we introduce new problem and network-specific operators. The performance of the ILS is evaluated and the efficiency of the new service is analyzed in terms of various instance and customer characteristics, comparing it to dedicated MPL and AHD services. Our computational analysis reveals that the combination of services has economic potential and satisfies customer preferences more effectively. According to our study, an average MHDPL vehicle can serve 21% more customers than a comparable AHD vehicle.