This means that a truck transports the corresponding goods for delivery together with robots and releases the robots at dedicated drop-off locations for the actual home delivery. Due to their lower speed and limited range, delivery robots are combined with specialized trucks to enable a fast and efficient delivery process. They are designed to travel short distances at pedestrian speed. Autonomous delivery robots (e.g., by Starship, 2019 and Marble, 2019) can transport a single parcel or grocery bag to customers for attended home delivery. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only increased the home deliveries, but also created consumer preferences for deliveries without human interaction and challenged companies to protect their workforce.ĭelivery by truck and robots is a promising approach to address these issues as well as to flexibly accommodate customers’ time window preferences. This increases customer service and reduces the number of failed deliveries, i.e., deliveries that are not accepted as customers are not at home. The complexity of planning deliveries is growing with entry restrictions in inner cities (e.g., ban of diesel engines) and the growing application of time windows to attended home deliveries. While attended home deliveries are convenient for customers, they account for a large share of logistics costs (Hübner, Kuhn, Wollenburg, 2016, Kuhn, Sternbeck, 2013). New concepts are needed to enable the projected growth of delivery volumes and prevent urban traffic from collapsing (Agatz, Fleischmann, van Nunen, 2008, Hübner, Holzapfel, Kuhn, Obermair, 2019, Orenstein, Raviv, Sadan, 2019). Home deliveries are contributing to this problem due to the increasing volume of online orders (Allen, Piecyk, Piotrowska, McLeod, Cherrett, Ghali, Nguyen, Bektas, Bates, Friday, Wise, Austwick, 2018, Ishfaq, Defee, Gibson, Raja, 2016, Wollenburg, Hübner, Trautrims, Kuhn, 2018), in particular as many deliveries are still performed by diesel trucks. Traffic congestion and pollution are growing problems in cities around the world. Further analyses reveal additional benefits of such mixed tours and the robustness of our approach for different problem settings. The numerical experiments show that this approach enables cost reductions of up to 43% compared to classical truck deliveries and up to 22% compared to a truck-and-robot system that does not allow deliveries by both truck and robots on the same tour. Our tailored solution approach is based on a General Variable Neighborhood Search that efficiently solves the routing problem and outperforms existing truck-and-robot routing algorithms (reducing the runtime by 37 to 94% in experiments). Our research addresses this issue and proposes the first mixed truck and robot delivery concept with robot depots in which both robots and the delivery truck can visit customers. This assumption disregards the fact that regular truck deliveries are still needed for some delivery requests, such as for the delivery of bulky items, or for customers who do not accept robots. Existing concepts consider home deliveries by robots, while trucks are only used to transport robots and not for deliveries. The system relies on small autonomous delivery robots to cover the last meters to a customer. A promising concept in this context are truck-and-robot systems with robot depots, as they enable significant cost and traffic reduction compared to classic truck deliveries. Innovative last-mile logistics solutions are needed to reduce delivery costs, traffic congestion, and pollution in cities.
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