Urban Logistics: Collaborative Urban Delivery Optimisation

Last-mile deliveries in urban areas often raise environmental and social issues in Singapore and urban cities worldwide. As the e-commerce market and urban logistics spending continues to grow globally (and locally), the social aspect of this trend i.e. congestion and environmental pollution needs to be addressed.

In this video, Professor Lau Hoong Chuin shares about his research in Urban Logistics, and how its strategic goal is to deliver an ecosystem that addresses the various aspects of collaborative last-mile delivery, from warehouse to consolidation centres to end point (B2C and B2B retail) deliveries.

Professor Lau is the director of the Fujitsu-SMU Urban Computing & Engineering Corp Lab (UNiCEN), and Professor of Information Systems.

From Singapore, the strategic hub of Asia, SMU applies its knowledge and global perspective in an Asian context to bridge concepts and provide critical insights. SMU research aims to create significant impact by addressing five societal challenges: 

Advancing Innovation & Technology

Interpreting Economies & Financial Markets

Navigating Boundaries & Borders

Managing for Sustainability

Strengthening Social Fabric & Quality of Life

Find out more: https://smu.edu.sg/research

Fujitsu-SMU Urban Computing & Engineering Corp Lab (UNiCEN): https://unicen.smu.edu.sg/

Faculty Profile: https://www.smu.edu.sg/faculty/profile/9620/LAU-Hoong-Chuin

Optimisation Modelling, Agent-Based Modelling and Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Planning and Scheduling Methods and Applications, Intelligent Decision Support Systems for Service Management

Handoko, S., Lau, H., & Cheng, S. (2016). Achieving Economic and Environmental Sustainabilities in Urban Consolidation Center With Bicriteria Auction. Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 13(4), 1471-1479.

Consolidation lies at the heart of the last-mile logistics problem. Urban consolidation centers (UCCs) have been set up to facilitate such consolidation all over the world. To the best of our knowledge, most—if not all—of the UCCs operate on volume-based fixed-rate charges. To achieve environmental sustainability while ensuring economic sustainability in urban logistics, we propose, in this paper, a bicriteria auction mechanism for the automated assignment of last-mile delivery orders to transport resources. We formulate and solve the winner determination problem of the auction as a biobjective programming model. We then present a systematic way to generate the Pareto frontier to characterize the tradeoff between achieving economic and environmental sustainabilities in urban logistics. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed bicriteria auction produces the solutions that significantly dominate those obtained from the fixed-rate mechanisms. Our sensitivity analysis on the willingness of carriers to participate in the UCC operation reveals that higher willingness is favorable toward achieving greater good for all, if UCC is designed to be nonprofit and self-sustaining.

Produced by

Office of Integrated Information Technology Services (IITS)

Office of Research & Tech Transfer (ORTT)

Singapore Management University

Keywords
Urban, Logistics, Government, Vehicles, Goods, Transport, Transportation, Delivery, Environmental economics, Multi-Agent Systems, Sustainable Development, Pollution, Urban Pollution, IMDA, SMU, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Management, University, Research, Optimization, Optimisation, Collaborative, UNICEN, Fujitsu