Vehicle Routing for Attended Home Delivery in City Logistics

Cost-efficient and sustainable delivery of e-commerce products results in enormous challenges for city logistics service providers. We focus on the last mile of delivery in terms of reliable and efficient vehicle routing approaches. In recent years, telematics based traffic data collection has built the ground for time-dependent vehicle routing, which supports the fulfillment of customer promises as well as economic and sustainable delivery concepts. This becomes extremely important in Attended Home Delivery applications, requiring the presence of the customer during delivery. Based on Floating Car Data and Data Mining methods, we provide time-dependent travel time data sets and discuss the integration of time-dependent travel times in time-dependent vehicle routing models. A case study offers insights into effort and benefits of sophisticated travel time collection, data aggregation and time-dependent vehicle routing.