Towards a sustainable and autonomous last mile delivery

Last mile delivery is one of the main loss-making processes within the supply chain management. Several aspects affect this process, and an appropriate management becomes complex due to the urban environment in which it takes place. This context in many cases is congested and presents several constraints: high presence of vehicles and people, reduced speed, busy parking lots and others. In addition, urban areas are under stress due to the increased demand for home delivery products, determined mainly by rise of e-commerce. Many cities are also adopting more restrictive policies in the mobility sector, with streets being converted to pedestrian or low-vehicle zones. The recent challenges are focused on increased efficiency of last mile delivery activities by considering different factors. In this paper, an innovative solution based on the use of unmanned autonomous vehicles and district hub approach is adopted for the last mile delivery. The study focuses on optimizing last-mile delivery operations satisfying customer requirements with a sustainable approach. A sustainable evaluation model is proposed based on the analysis of environmental impacts, the study of economic effectiveness, and the analysis of social impacts, quantifying external costs. A simulation case study is proposed to evaluate the impacts of the proposed approach. The findings highlight
how the use of unmanned autonomous vehicles and district hub approach can improve sustainability performance in
last-mile delivery activities.