Journal
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART E-LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION REVIEW
Volume 172, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2023.103066
Keywords
COVID-19; Last -mile; Resilience; Crowdsourcing; Collection -point; Micro -hub
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the traditional retail sector and led to a surge in demand for e-commerce delivery of essential goods. This study assesses the resilience of last-mile distribution operations by integrating a last-mile distribution model, the resilience triangle concept, and the R4 resilience framework. The analysis highlights different distribution strategies, including independent crowdsourced fleet, collection-point pickup, and integration with logistics service providers, and recommends creating reliable crowdsourced deliveries, ensuring customer willingness to self-collect, and negotiating contracts with multiple logistics service providers.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant breakdown of the traditional retail sector resulting in an unprecedented surge in e-commerce demand for the delivery of essential goods. Consequently, the pandemic raised concerns pertaining to e-retailers' ability to maintain and efficiently restore level of service in the event of such low-probability high-severity market disruptions. Thus, considering e-retailers' role in the supply of essential goods, this study assesses the resilience of last-mile distribution operations under disruptions by integrating a Continuous Approximation (CA) based last-mile distribution model, the resilience triangle concept, and the Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness, and Rapidity (R4) resilience framework. The proposed R4 Last Mile Distribution Resilience Triangle Framework is a novel performance-based qualitative-cumquantitative domain-agnostic framework. Through a set of empirical analyses, this study highlights the opportunities and challenges of different distribution/outsourcing strategies to cope with disruption. In particular, the authors analyzed the use of an independent crowdsourced fleet (flexible service contingent on driver availability); the use of collection-point pickup (unconstrained downstream capacity contingent on customer willingness to self-collect); and integration with a logistics service provider (reliable service with high distribution costs). Overall, this work recommends the e-retailers to create a suitable platform to ensure reliable crowdsourced deliveries, position sufficient collection-points to ensure customer willingness to self-collect, and negotiate contracts with several logistics service providers to ensure adequate backup distribution.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available