Community logistics for dynamic vehicle dispatching: The effects of community departure “time” and “space”

The rise of e-commerce has completely transformed the dynamicity and problem nature of last-mile delivery, owing to significant B2C customer demand in compact urban areas. Given the unprecedented growths of urban last-mile deliveries, this paper proposes a novel postponement prioritized-route optional approach, namely Community Logistics (CL), as a new logistics tool to manage dynamic arrivals of delivery requests received in e-commerce hubs. Each vehicle is responsible for serving a “community”. At each decision epoch, fragmented e-commerce delivery requests arrived at the depot are either allocated to a community or postponed to later epochs for actual last-mile delivery. With an objective of consolidating newly arrived requests, we develop two dynamic policies – temporal and spatial, respectively for temporally delaying vehicle’s departure and spatially allocating more pre-partitioned geographical cells into one community. The main contribution of this study lies in a spatiotemporal relativity analysis and a comparative analysis. The former demonstrates the essence of incorporating both dynamic community departure times and dynamic community regions into managing urban e-commerce deliveries, whereas the latter validates the merits of Community Logistics against dynamic vehicle routing solutions. In the end, we call for further developments of community logistics strategies to address the impacts of urban deliveries due to the rise of e-commerce and online shopping.