The last-mile delivery challenge: evaluating the efficiency of smart parcel stations

With recent advances in technology, e-commerce has significantly increased over the last decade. In response to higher customer expectations, last-mile delivery strategies need to be redesigned for companies to remain competitive in the market. In this setting, smart parcel stations (SPS) have been widely deployed in several countries as evidence and proof of concept for their viability in last mile delivery. Nevertheless, little empirical research has been done on wide logistic implications of the use of SPS in parcel delivery. To the best of our knowledge, this research work is among the first attempts to analysis the deployment of smart parcel stations as solution to the last mile delivery problem. We propose three different mathematical formulations to model a two-stage delivery problem where a retailer delivers parcels to set of customers via a set of SPS. The models were designed to capture many key performance indicators and efficiency measures including travelled distance, carbon emissions, customer service level, and smart parcel occupancy and utilisation.