Overview

• Published July 14 in the European Journal of Operational Research, the study outlines a hybrid system coordinating electric vans, autonomous delivery robots and parcel lockers for urban routes.
• The framework prioritizes prime customers for same-day service, directing lower-priority orders to lockers or scheduling them for next-day delivery.
• Simulated experiments show up to 53% reductions in route and vehicle-use costs compared with EV-only approaches.
• The researchers’ metaheuristic outperformed Gurobi on large-scale test instances reported in the paper.
• The authors propose potential applications in health care, grocery delivery and municipal services, while noting the results are simulation-based with no field trials reported.