Last mile logistics is an emerging research area with growing interest. The rapid growth is mainly driven by increasing urbanization and population growth, e-commerce development, changing consumer behaviour, innovation, and growing attention to sustainability.
For logistical companies, there are several challenges connected to the supply of populated urban areas. On the one hand, the lack of space combined with the growing delivery volumes that leads to traffic jams, high levels of emissions as well inefficiencies along the delivery process. All this results in lower service quality, lower delivery reliability and higher delivery cost, while simultaneously lowering the quality of living in the city.
One of the solutions for these challenges is the usage of dedicated depots for pickup and delivery. This solution has been used in the past and it has shown that depots dedicated to a specific stakeholder, however, are inefficient both in space utilization and pollution prevention. Therefore, S.M.U.D.“Shared micro depots for urban pickup and delivery” is addressing this issue by providing publicly acceptable and sustainable solutions for last mile delivery that allow the sharing of the services between all stakeholders, thus optimizing the routes and space within the cities as well as leading to a reduction of local exhaust emissions and greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion.
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