In Germany, for instance, it is forecasted that by 2023, 4.4 billion shipments will need to be handled per year compared to 1.69 billion in 2000 (Statista 2019). Thus, more geographic concentration and increasing online orders per person lead to a steady increase in parcel volumes to be handled. In 2018, e-commerce still showed a worldwide growth rate of 23.3% (Statista 2018).
Furthermore, e-commerce is in a steady increase and more and more commercial goods are ordered online. There are estimates that by 2050, 70% of the world’s population, approximately 6.3 billion people, will live in major cities (Bretzke 2013). Urbanization denotes the trend that more and more people move into urban areas in general and into “megacities,” with 10 million inhabitants and more, in particular.
Increasing volume Two global mega-trends, in particular, urbanization and e-commerce, are strong drivers for an ever increasing demand for last-mile delivery services. Its high relevance is mainly triggered by the following general developments and challenges: Last-mile delivery, i.e., all logistics activities related to the delivery of shipments to private customer households in urban areas, is a hot topic in cities all over the globe. Furthermore, we elaborate promising future research avenues. To do so, we systematically record the alternative delivery concepts in a compact notation scheme, discuss the most important decision problems, and survey existing research on operations research methods solving these problems. This paper surveys established and novel last-mile concepts and puts special emphasis on the decision problems to be solved when setting up and operating each concept. Among the most prominent are unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and autonomous delivery robots taking over parcel delivery. Therefore, it is anything but surprising that in recent years many novel delivery concepts on the last mile have been innovated. Growing parcel volumes to be delivered toward customer homes increase the number of delivery vans entering the city centers and thus add to congestion, pollution, and negative health impact. In the wake of e-commerce and its successful diffusion in most commercial activities, last-mile distribution causes more and more trouble in urban areas all around the globe.