Transport carriers’ cooperation on the last-mile delivery in urban areas

A sharing logistics platform for less-than-truckloads could increase efficiency in city pickup and last-mile deliveries under time window constraints by pairing (matching) truck bidders and last-mile logistics requesters. The platform will propose new tours based on localization data, travel time and time-window constraints; it operates a matching algorithm to search for stable truck-sharing deals aiming to reduce the number of trucks in use as well as their operational costs. These sharing deals also reduce traveling distances and gas emissions. We simulate a model to understand the effects of fixed costs and variable costs in the operations, we account for reductions, and we provide some managerial insights. Additionally, we perform sensitivity analysis to consider the effect of delivery time windows’ relaxation and additional travel distance constraints to evaluate the proposed solutions under practical conditions.