AdONE Seminar: Prof. Jan Fabian Ehmke (Universität Wien)

The ongoing growth of e-commerce has led to a significant increase in last-mile deliveries. We investigate mobile parcel lockers (MPLs) as a new idea to satisfy varying demand. MPLs can be parked for temporary collection of items at different locations, keeping the pickup distance to the customer short and avoiding high infrastructure cost. In this talk, we compare the efficiency of MPLs with the efficiency of fixed parcel lockers and conventional attended home deliveries. We apply a fixed fleet to maximize the number of served customers, respecting individual customer preferences in terms of pickup distances and delivery time windows. We present a mathematical model and an iterated local search to solve instances of realistic size. We also investigate the usage of MPLs in a dynamic customer-acceptance context. We evaluate the different delivery services regarding managerial insights on service quality and efficiency.