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2394. Optimizing Last-Mile Logistics: Analyzing Customer-Centric Truck-and-Drone Delivery Systems

Invited abstract in session WD-56: Last mile delivery with drones, stream Transportation.

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: S04 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Giovanni Campuzano
IEBIS, University of Twente
2. Alan Osorio-Mora
RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau
3. Eduardo Lalla-Ruiz
Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente
4. Martijn Mes
IEBIS, University of Twente
5. Paolo Toth
DEI, University of Bologna

Abstract

Addressing transportation problems with customer-centric objective functions has become essential for last-mile service providers seeking to enhance service quality, cultivate customer loyalty, and strategically position themselves in the market. These problems have been getting more and more attention from service providers and have shown substantial benefits in markets with large volumes of deliveries per day, such as the last mile. In this paper, we study two truck-and-drone delivery systems that minimize the total waiting time of customers. To study realistic scenarios, we incorporate the interdependencies of asymmetric transportation times, variable drone speeds, weather conditions, energy consumption, and time windows. We formulate these transportation problems as Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs). Furthermore, we propose a Simulated Annealing metaheuristic framework with Local Search procedures (SA-LS) with a cutoff mechanism to avoid large computational times in high-temperature stages. In the experiments, we provide insights into the benefits of addressing customer satisfaction for truck-and-drone last-mile delivery systems. Accordingly, the results show that even though the latency and makespan are time-related objective functions, minimizing the latency does not directly minimize the makespan, and vice versa. Moreover, enabling the drone to fly at slower speed levels generates significant reductions in the total customer waiting times.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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