Exact Approach for Last Mile Delivery with Autonomous Robots

The Courier, Express and Parcel industry is facing great challenges due to constantly growing parcel volumes combined with increasing customer expectations. A concept to overcome these challenges bases on delivery robots. These robots have a unit capacity and are capable of transporting small goods autonomously on sidewalks. One field of application is the last mile of parcel delivery, where a small fleet of robots could deliver time-critical parcels over small distances. Compared to traditional trucking personnel costs can be saved and due to their autonomy, the robots can operate all day long. In this study, we model the arising optimization problem of scheduling robots and customers. Moreover, we compare two different assignment approaches between robots and micro-depots and evaluate the concept based on test instances.