Comparing Home and Parcel Lockers’ Delivery Systems: a Math-Heuristic Approach

E-commerce is a continuously growing sector worldwide, with important repercussions on the delivery system in urban areas and especially in the Business to Consumer (B2C) sector. The delivery of a package to a consumer’s address involves not only high costs for couriers (greater number of kilometres travelled), but also increased congestion and greater environmental pollution (greater volume of pollutants released into the air). To rationalize deliveries in urban areas the use of collection points, equipped with lockers, to store the goods that users have ordered has been considered in literature. This work compares two alternative delivery options: deliveries to the consumer’s home versus to Lockers. To make this comparison we used a cluster first route second math-heuristic approach. In the clustering phase, we experimented a new clustering function, while the routing phase consists in solving an instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem for each generated cluster. Finally, we applied the math-heuristic to a real case (the Italian municipality of Dolo near Venice) and compared the two delivery alternatives. We evaluate the performance considering two different fleets of vehicles, with small and medium capacity. In addition, since additional trips might be performed by consumers to pick up parcels at Lockers, a sensitivity analysis was carried out to analyse the sustainability of the proposed city logistics scheme.