Abstract:

Environmental issues and sustainable development strategies in cities are mostly focused on environmentally friendly transportation systems. Every day, city logistics faces environmental challenges in promoting and sustaining a cleaner transportation environment that prioritises emissions, traffic noise, and congestion reduction. These issues prompted the development of the idea of green logistics solution for last-mile deliveries, considering synchronization between e-vans and e-cargo bikes developed as a Two-Echelon Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Partial Recharging (2E-EVRPTW-PR). The first echelon represents an urban zone, and the second echelon represents a restricted traffic zone (e.g., historical center) in which e-vans in the first and e-cargo bikes in the second echelon are used for customers’ deliveries. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been demonstrated comparing two different cases, i.e., the EVRPTW-PR considering e-vans for the first case, and the 2E-EVRPTW-PR considering e-vans and e-cargo bikes for the second case. The comparison has been carried out on existing EVRPTW-PR instances for the first case, and on novel 2E-EVRPTW-PR instances for the second case, in which customers of initial EVRPTW-PR instances have been divided into two zones (urban and restricted traffic zones) by using Fuzzy C-mean clustering. Furthermore, the findings inspire logistics organisations to use zero-emission solutions for last-mile delivery, particularly in congested areas. The findings demonstrated the benefits of employing e-cargo bikes in congested areas in terms of lowering total expenditures.