A Comparison between Urban Cooperative Delivery and Direct Delivery Strategies

摘要

Urban cooperative delivery is a truck demand management strategy which cansignificantly reduce urban congestion and emissions by consolidating deliveries of goods at afacility located outside of the urban areas. Although the economy of scale from load and routeconsolidations could bring companies improvement of service range and routes, such benefitsdepend on the additional terminal operation costs. This study evaluated the effectiveness ofurban cooperative delivery strategy in terms of the monetary cost, by comparing the totallogistics cost under several settings defined by a number of key factors of interest, for example,customer density, demand quantity, facility location, and vehicle type. In this study, weextended the use of Continuous approximation (CA) method to modeling the urban cooperativedelivery problem. The results demonstrated that there is no “one size fits all” solution to theproblem. We discussed in length under what circumstances the urban cooperative strategies arefavorable and otherwise. The study findings provides theoretical insights to the effectiveness ofurban cooperative delivery strategies, which contrasts to the case-study based approach mostcommonly seen in the current literature.