Strategic Design of Hub-and-Spoke City Logistics Network using Autonomous Vehicle for the First and Last Mile Delivery

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of on-line shopping and cloud kitchens the same-day delivery demands have rapidly grown and caused much city logistics challenges More vehicles for shipping huge amount of origin-destination (OD) deliveries inside a city lead to more traffic jams accidents energy consumption and air pollutions We proposed a Hub-and-Spoke (HS) framework to design the logistics network for these OD shipments where small autonomous vehicles are used to conduct the first-and-last mile delivery that connect customers to a hub and then trucks tranship those shipments between hubs Such an HS logistics network helps reduce the number of vehicles required for inidividual OD shipmeents Given the estimated amount of OD shipments in each time period during one day we seek optimal schedules and routes for transshipment trucks between hubs Moreover by treating the autonomous vehicles as shared vehicles we can also reposition these autonomous vehicles between hubs in different time periods to increase the utilization of autonomous vehicles and trucks We have proposed Integer Programs on a time-space network to calculate exact optimal solutions but it is too time consuming To solve more practical cases of larger sizes we propose a greedy algorithm and a Genetic Algorithm to find good feasible truck routes in short time Then we propose a framework that iteratively solves a smaller time-space network of few periods in a rolling horizon fashion which produces the best results in our computational experiments

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	I-Lin Wang (Supervisor)