Stochastic Optimisation of Urban Delivery Systems with Micro Hubs

To compete with e-commerce giants such as Amazon, many local businesses start to offer fast same-day delivery, often within a few hours after an order was placed. Deliveries are conducted by local delivery fleets. However, the narrow delivery times and the geographical spread of pickup and delivery locations result in a lack of consolidation opportunities. This can be remedied by so-called micro hubs, which can serve as transhipment centres for parcels in urban delivery. Drivers can store parcels from adjacent shops for redistribution. They also can pick up parcels from different shops for joint delivery to customers in the same region. Thus, micro hubs can increase consolidation opportunities and may also enable the use of smaller, green, and clean vehicles for first and last mile delivery. Within this project, optimisation models incorporating consolidation centres in the pickup and delivery system of urban same day delivery are developed. Further, different solution approaches will be investigated to cope for the uncertainty in demand at time of planning.