Service Network Design for Same Day Delivery with Mixed Autonomous Fleets

Two-tier city logistics is a well-established concept to achieve high levels of consolidation in urban freight distribution. With the recent shift towards offering same day delivery, service providers in parcel delivery are looking at new solutions to deal with the resulting challenges. We introduce autonomous vehicles as an upcoming technology to this field of research and consider a mixed fleet in the first tier of city logistics. Because autonomy cannot be ensured on all roads of the network, we handle the heterogeneous infrastructure with manually operated vehicles serving as platoon leaders. In our proposed MILP formulation of service network design for autonomous vehicles in platoons (SNDAVP), we show how platooning can be incorporated into this tactical planning problem. Computational experiments on first instances are conducted using CPLEX.