Designing sustainable last-mile delivery services in online retailing

The continuous growth of online sales together with the inefficiency of the last-mile of the e-commerce supply chain puts a lot of pressure on urban areas in terms of congestion, emissions and pollution. It is critical to increase the efficiency of the last-mile deliveries to enhance the financial and environmental performance of internet retailers. The primary goal of this project is to develop and evaluate decision support models and tools to facilitate the optimal design of different delivery service models in online retailing and to identify service models and corresponding operating strategies that provide the most benefits in terms of various sustainability criteria. To create more sustainable last-mile operations, this project is organized around two PhD projects, one that particularly focuses on optimizing the delivery operations and one that focuses on the optimal design of the distribution network.

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