Delivery management

McKinsey partners and industry experts discuss the future expansion of parcel delivery using drone technology.

Urbano has been developed by Cornell University and other organizations. This software has some special features like download geospatial data, import and aggregate data, lookup and modify metadata, routing in different modes, analyze amenities and streets, integrated cad workflow, etc. Also, is useful to quantify urban parameters like amenity demand, streetscore, amenityscore and walkscore. It has a friendly interface to visualize different urban planning parameters.

Modal race between different freight transport modes, which must include at least one cargo bike or trike. An origin, destination, time of the day and cargo weight are set. Each participant loads the cargo and starts travelling at the same time. Each one must carry a chronometer and there will be independent supervisors timing the participants as well. When arriving at the set destination, travel time is recorded for each participant and compared. Modelling costs, pollutant and GHG emissions, as well as predicted travel time, is useful to show additional benefits of using micromobility for freight transport. Using mobile apps to show positions in real time and streaming can also help the activity be more engaging and attractive.

"The advent of automated driving technology is poised to transform the trucking industry in the years and decades to come, but it is clear that autonomous trucks will not be ready to handle all driving tasks and conditions anytime soon. Instead, the developers of this technology are working to build a future where drivers and automation work hand in hand to transport freight more safely and efficiently."

The trucking industry is expected to be an early adopter of self-driving technology which could have a major impact on the truck-driving profession.

This report merges analyses of distribution models, consumer behavior, data, and insight from trucking industry experts to advise on shifting retail logistics and supply chains. It will provide trucking industry stakeholders with a better understanding of how to adapt to the opportunities and challenges of e-commerce.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approved the first drone flight beyond the operator's line of sight as part of a joint program with the University of Arizona Fairbanks.

While consumers have been making more sustainable choices in the physical retail environment, these habits have not translated as well into the digital shopping environment.

UPS has received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate a “drone airline” which will first be used to build a drone delivery network for hospital campuses around the US.

As companies develop designs for package-bearing delivery drones, there are growing questions about the safety risks to the public.

Emerging delivery drone technology raises questions and concerns about privacy, liability, and noise levels. There are few legal precedents or existing laws based specifically on drones.

Common carrier locker systems are a way to provide secure, high density delivery locations in public spaces while improving delivery drivers’ efficiency. The University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab conducted a pilot project of this locker system in the Seattle Municipal Tower.

Flying delivery drones are meeting regulatory roadblocks and some companies are turning to small robots that make deliveries, by travelling on sidewalks, as a safer and more efficient alternative.

Current availability of technology and FAA regulations mean that, contrary to e-commerce company announcements, drones aren't able to deliver packages by air.

Amazon announced plans to launch a Prime Air delivery drone, "a hybrid aircraft that’s capable of vertical takeoff and landing as well as sustained forward flight."

Uber planned to deliver food by drone in San Diego in a test program approved by the federal government.

This article questions the common assumptions that delivery drones would be more efficient, cost less and be better for the environment.

This report studies curb use at five typical locations in Greater Downtown Seattle to understand how cities can effectively manage curb access.

Across the U.S. growing eCommerce is resulting in increasing deliveries, most of which are inefficient and negatively affect the community. This report is the first in a series that analyzes the opportunities, challenges, and innovations related to eCommerce delivery.

Meal delivery service Uber Eats unveiled the design for its delivery drone. Uber Eats hopes to use the drones for meal deliveries by next summer.

The United States Parcel Service (UPS) wants to expand its Flight Forward program to include private home drone delivery service.

Robots delivering takeout from restaurants have begun circulating in Washington D.C.

The Federal Aviation Administration awarded the United Parcel Service certification to use drones for delivery on medical campuses. This came after a year of working together on the terms of the certification.

As e-commerce grows, the quantity of packages being delivered to apartment buildings has become overwhelming. Some owners and developers have begun planning for this by increasing the capacity of package rooms and investing in delivery notification services.

This article considers if utilizing drones for goods delivery is more efficient than traditional truck delivery, but it depends on the source of energy and size of the delivery.

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to transform the way supply chains function, especially with long distance trucking.

“The growth in e-commerce is driving up demand for smaller industrial spaces nearer to cities so fulfillment firms can quickly get their products to customers, but it remains to be seen if fulfillment centers will start operating in suburban neighborhoods.”

The increasing popularity of online shopping is causing more package deliveries to apartment buildings than the building can handle. New apps, services and building lobby designs are attempting to manage this issue.

Online shopping is making congestion worse by adding endless delivery trucks to cities that are not designed to handle the rising number of daily deliveries.

This website serves as a guide to how e-commerce has affected industrial real estate and building design.

One-day and same-day deliveries are causing companies to need warehouse space closer to the dense urban areas they are serving. However, this land is scarce, expensive and involves a long development process.

Amazon’s shipping network has been increasing rapidly over the past decade which has led to severe working conditions for their thousands of employees around the world, especially during events like “Prime Day.”

With the rise of e-commerce, Americans are demanding more deliveries. However, with declining warehouse availability, congested streets and limited curb access, the U.S.’s infrastructure may not be able to handle the increasing demand.

“Retailers and logistics firms are establishing warehouses closer to large urban centers to keep up with rising consumer demand for faster delivery of products ordered online.”

Logistics development company Prologis has built the first multi-story industrial warehouse in the U.S. just south of Seattle. Other multi-story warehouses have been planned or proposed in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles as growing e-commerce demands faster deliveries.

“Industrial real estate analysts say that in recent years, an increasing number of massive distribution centers have popped up in response to growing e-commerce.”

The Teamsters labor union wrote UPS an 83 page document outlining demands to ban UPS from using drones or driverless vehicles. UPS must balance these demands with growing competition for the package delivery industry and the flexibility it requires to remain competitive.

Today, warehouses are transforming into massive “mega-distribution centers” located in increasingly suburban areas. However, the rapid delivery expectations of E-commerce will also perpetuate the need for a network of local, smaller-scale supply points.

Open source simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

A blueprint for designing 21st century streets, the Guide unveils the toolbox and the tactics cities use to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

Provides a real time transit visualization and analytics interface.

Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) - is an open source, highly portable, microscopic and continuous traffic simulation package designed to handle large road networks.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform, specifically cross-sections of streets for multiple uses.

Open source software, digital infrastructure, and governance frameworks that enable public-private collaboration and the seamless exchange of transport data.

Open source software, digital infrastructure, and governance frameworks that enable public-private collaboration and the seamless exchange of transport data.

Urban population movement simulation tool for strategic planning.

An open source, C++ routing tool oriented more toward developers.

Open source and free, web-based urban design platform.

The Option Generator allows users to create a list of ranked policy instruments based on individual search criteria.

The Future of Mobility Scenario Game is a role-playing game that allows practitioners, communities, and anyone who wants to play it to experience the future of mobility in a city from different perspectives.

Open-access scenario planning package that allows users to analyze how their community's current growth pattern and future decisions impacting growth will impact a range of measures from public health, fiscal resiliency and environmental sustainability.

EcoLogistics Self-monitoring tool is a calculation tool developed for cities to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions from urban freight transport. It allows the assessment of baseline and target scenarios wherein specific technologies or strategies are hypothetically implemented. The tool also acts as a monitoring tool for cities to make meaningful comparisons over time and with other cities in terms of urban freight emissions.

Bicycle and pedestrian counting technical equipment and consulting services.

CoAXs uses open data and free software to enable users to test new transportation scenarios in real time. Users can activate and deactivate selected hypothetical and existing transit routes; examine effects of changes such as in bus speeds or frequencies; and explore the impact of these changes on different locations in a region. Great example of work done in Boston.

Citilabs offers a number of analytical and visualization products to aid in modeling population movement, scenario planning, and transit operations.

Guidelines for cities to implement sustainable and environmental mobility strategies for people and goods.

"Thanks to a literature review, interviews of the players of the French CEP sector and urban parcel delivery sector, as well as comparisons with other European countries, this article analyzes the sector's changes, its drivers, and provides an accurate picture, based on examples and figures, of an under-studied sector. The article also highlights some future prospects for the new segment such as the segment's consolidation and the rise of cross-border e-commerce."

"This Future of Mobility White Paper is intended to inform and guide policymakers and modelers developing the next iteration of the CTP –CTP 2050 –by presenting updated descriptions and analyses of developments impacting California’s transportation system."

Between 1998 and 2005, employment in the U.S. warehousing industry grew at a compound annual growth rate of 22.23%, and the number of establishments increased at compound annual growth rate of 9.48%. Over this same period of time, the price for transportation fuels increased dramatically and became much more volatile. In this paper we examine the microeconomic and macroeconomic forces that have enabled such rapid growth in the warehousing industry. We also analyze structural change through employment and warehouse construction starts data and show that a new breed of warehouse has emerged – the mega distribution center, or mega DC.

Chinese companies are going all-out on unmanned systems for delivery logistics. A fleet of new autonomous cargo drones, robotic trucks, and quadcopters are private-sector developments that are making China a future world leader in robotics.

This white paper will discuss the non-technological trends logistics managers much know and then will hone in on the technologies that will impact the logistics in 2018.

This report includes information on the first of many research tasks planned for the partnership between SDOT and the Urban Freight Lab. This is the first assessment in any American city of the privately-owned and operated elements of the Final 50 Feet of goods delivery supply chains. These include private truck freight bays and loading docks, delivery policies and operations within buildings located in Center City.

"This research analyzed the competitiveness of freight tricycles, low- capacity freight delivery vehicles, as compared with diesel vans in urban areas. Freight tricycles, also known as electric-assisted trikes, are low- emission vehicles powered by a combination of human effort and an electric engine. This research developed a cost model that incorporated vehicle ownership and operation models as well as logistics constraints such as time windows, cargo capacity, fuel consumption, and energy use. Unlike previous research efforts, the model was tailored to the unique characteristics of freight tricycles and diesel van deliveries in urban areas. The model was used to analyze the competitiveness of freight tricycles against diesel- powered delivery vans. "

This book is about on-demand delivery and its logistic process. It also presents the trend of on-demand services.

The Global Street Design Guide is supporting practitioners to redefine the role of streets in cities around the world.

"In this paper, we present a project in Munich, Germany, where the last mile package delivery is carried out by a CEP company by cargo bikes and eBikes. To this end, two containers and one truck-trailer are placed in the city center which function as depot stations for the parcels to be delivered nearby. We analyze the delivery data, present an optimization scheme for finding suitable container locations, and simulate the routes conducted by cargo bikes for an average day. It can be concluded that the presented approach is a feasible solution for the package delivery in densely populated cities. The vehicle mileage covered by diesel trucks per day is significantly reduced from 180 km to 45 km, approximately."

This paper examines the suburbanization of warehousing and trucking activity within US metropolitan areas between the 1980s and the present using Gini indices as a measure of concentration. While historical work exists on the relocation of transportation and warehousing activity to suburban locations, there has been little to document the most recent shifts in warehousing and logistics. This research does so via spatial analysis of Economic Census data, finding that while most US metropolitan areas have experienced decentralization in the spatial distribution of freight-related activity, there is also some growth in core counties, indicating that a more complex process is going on than simple suburbanization.

Trikes can be a major competitor in the CDB delivery market as it can navigate bike lanes and be parked more freely.

"As e-commerce grows as a percentage of total retail sales, consumers are choosing delivery options with shorter delivery cycles. Not only does this mean that Amazon Prime customers (65 million subscribers in September 2016) can choose Prime Now two-hour deliveries for some high-volume items, it means other retailers are offering same-day deliveries, as are some package delivery companies (United Parcel Service [UPS], Federal Express [FedEx], and United States Postal Service [USPS]) in certain cities. This report reviews how express delivery services now operate, how they are regulated, and how they may affect the state’s transportation system."

This article looks at how "retailers are honing their distribution center strategy to meet current e-commerce demands.

"Completing urban freight deliveries is increasingly a challenge in congested urban areas, particularly when delivery trucks are required to meet time windows. Depending on the route characteristics, Electric Assist (EA) cargo bicycles may serve as an economically viable alternative to delivery trucks. The purpose of this paper is to compare the delivery route cost trade-offs between box delivery trucks and EA cargo bicycles that have the same route and delivery characteristics, and to explore the question, under what conditions do EA cargo bikes perform at a lower cost than typical delivery trucks?"

The aim of this paper is to make an overview of the business models of the companies developing AVs for Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) of goods and to find out what is the attitudes of the online customers towards using AVs for delivery of their goods.

Like most other industries, transportation and logistics (T&L) is currently confronting immense change; and like all change, this brings both risk and opportunity. New technology, new market entrants, new customer expectations, and new business models. In this paper we discuss four key areas of disruption logistics companies need to focus on now, and explore some possible futures of the industry.

Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to take space in a first-of-its-kind three-story warehouse, a new type of distribution center that could reduce delivery times in congested cities to hours rather than days. While common in densely-populated Asian and European cities, modern warehouses with multiple floors have been absent until recently in the U.S., where higher land and construction costs deterred developers. But now that more retailers are racing to deliver more same-day packages, developers are starting to build the multistory fulfillment centers needed to speed delivery in congested cities.

In theory, e-commerce can be greener than a bunch of shoppers making personal trips in their own cars: Consolidating products and delivering them on one route to a bunch of homes requires fewer miles on the road. However, that calculus changes significantly if items are coming from further away and have to be sent immediately, which creates fewer opportunities for lumping deliveries together.

Smartphone data from riders and drivers schlepping meals for restaurant-to-home courier service Deliveroo shows that bicycles are faster than cars. In towns and cities, bicyclists are also often faster than motorized two-wheelers.

As e-commerce sales march ahead of in-store sales, the major issue discussed at the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s (RILA) Retail Supply Chain Conference: Logistics 2013 was best practices for developing and executing an omni-channel distribution strategy. And real estate—particularly distribution centers (DCs)—is a significant part of the process. This article reviews the main questions asked during the conference.

This paper provides examples of how cities have successfully changed curb use to support transit. It is focused on the types of busy, store-lined streets where high-ridership transit lines often struggle with reliability. These key curbside management strategies support reliable transit and safer streets in one of two ways: either by directly making room for transit, or supporting transit projects by better managing the many demands on the urban curb.

This paper is focused on the analysis of the four Italian pilots, three in Genoa and one in Milan, highlighting the peculiarities of each one and investigating the data collected in the 12 months test. Each pilot represents a specific and well defined case study. The data used for the elaboration of this paper have been collected by pilot companies and, for the Italian pilots, elaborated by Poliedra – Politecnico di Milano.

"This chapter firstly approaches these questions from the historical perspective of in-house logistics, as this provides a clear understanding of companies’ motivations for implementing driverless transport systems and the individual experience of company decision-makers’. Using case studies from the field of logistics and freight transport, this chapter will examine current fields of application and, wherever possible, the navigation and safety concept required for autonomous driving as well as control. Moreover, it will outline specific use cases for freight transport."

This article explores the different ways retailers might engage with their customers in the future as we shift into an evermore digital-physical hybrid world.

Drones, for the last few years, have been viewed as the future of last-mile delivery for a variety of organizations ranging from 3PLs to hospitals. Amazon has applied for a waiver with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that, if approved, would allow the retailer to begin drone delivery in the United States.