Improving urban deliveries via collaboration

Resumen

Distribution of goods is essential for the economic development of cities but at the same time it entails several problems to the urban systems and different stakeholders. Carriers spend a significant portion of their cost in the last-mile distribution due to traffic congestion and lack of available loading/unloading facilities. In turn, citizens undergo environmental effects like pollution, noise or space competition. Collaborative transportation is currently one of the major trends in transportation research due to its potential benefits with little need for big infrastructure or costly investments. This thesis deals with three different situations that appear repeatedly in the urban context, which can be improved by means of collaboration among private companies and/or public authorities. The first part of the thesis studies a little-disruptive collaboration approach, which is based on sharing loading/unloading urban facilities via an in-advance booking system, managed by local public authorities. In this context, the Parking Slot Assignment Problem is the mathematical problem that finds assignments of carriers to parking places that satisfy their time windows requests. We propose a feasibility model first, and then four other models with various objective functions that penalize in different ways the deviation from the requested time windows. We propose and compare two different formulations: one with time as a continuous variable and a second one with time discretization. Finally, we evaluate and compare the different proposals with extensive computational experiments in a set of test instances. An intermediate level of collaboration among carriers is studied in the second part of this thesis. Urban areas have high customers density and usually there are shared customers (customers with demand from different carriers in the same time horizon). We propose an innovative problem: the Shared Customer Collaboration Vehicle Routing Problem, where several carriers are willing to collaborate transferring part of the demand of their shared customers, if the overall transportation cost is reduced. A vehicle-based and a load-based formulation are studied, and experimented over a specifically generated instance set. The highest level of collaboration in urban deliveries resorts to Urban Consolidation Centers, which are normally led by public authorities but need the collaboration of carriers for a successful implementation. Urban Consolidation Centers are urban terminals where the load from different carriers is consolidated and then, a unique neutral carrier performs last-mile deliveries. In the third part of the thesis we propose continuous models that analyze the improvement in efficiency of urban distribution with the use of Urban Consolidation Centers under different assumptions. Continuous approximation models are known to produce robust solutions, which are useful to provide guidelines for general cases through sensitive analysis. In the three parts of the thesis, innovative models and approaches are proposed and validated on experiments that use data from real scenarios.