[ARTICLE] The authors study a delivery strategy for last-mile deliveries in urban areas which combines freight transportation with mass mobility systems with the goal of creating synergies contrasting negative externalities caused by transportation.

by Claudia Archetti (ESSEC Business School), Luca Bertazzi

In the e-commerce era, vendors have to satisfy a large number of on-line orders, mainly from private customers, with low weight and volume, reduced delivery time, and overlap of customers' time windows. Production is made available all day long. New strategies and new technologies are emerging for deliveries. The processing time of the orders is reduced. These new features generate interesting challenges in formulating and solving Routing and Inventory Routing problems. After discussing these features and the corresponding challenges, we recall the relevant literature in Routing and Inventory Routing and provide future research directions, mainly related to routing problems with release dates, routing problems with crowdshipping, and inventory routing problems in the e-commerce era.

[Please find the research paper here]