Urban consolidation solutions for parcel delivery considering location, fleet and route choice

Consolidation schemes can reduce the negative impacts of urban freight movements. For this reason, in recent years several city authorities have promoted different measures to foster the implementation of urban consolidation centers. However, only a few real-world publicly promoted initiatives have succeeded due to several operational, financial, and regulatory issues. In this paper, we investigate different city logistics solutions for a mail delivery service in the city of Austin, Texas. We do that by using a model for the multi-depot vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous vehicle fleet for urban consolidation centers (UCCs) based on metaheuristics. The model considers the total costs and the environmental impacts of alternative UCC configurations and policy scenarios. According to the results, combinations of regulations and subsidies addressing both traffic inbound and outbound the facilities could be the most efficient and environmental friendly approaches. Factors like demand and traffic congestion have a significant impact on the overall performance of the solutions.