The rapid rise of electronic commerce has entailed an increase in logistic complexity, with last-mile logistics being the most critical element in deliveries. Since users prefer goods to be delivered at home, one of the biggest challenges faced by e-commerce is to reduce the number of incidents that occur in the delivery of goods to the homes of customers. In many cases, these deliveries cannot take place because recipients are not at the agreed delivery point, leading to a decrease in the quality of service and an increase in distribution costs. Furthermore, sometimes the delivery policies are not in tune with the customers’ expectations. This work presents a new perspective of the last-mile logistics in the context of multichannel retail, asking customers to provide several delivery locations (at home, at work, at a familiar home, in a shop, in a locker, etc.) associated with different time windows. In addition, the customer could state their preferences about these locations. This work formulates the problem and develops different approaches to solve it. A benchmark is proposed to analyze the performance and limitations. The results reveal that a distribution policy with several locations can improve the efficiency of electronic commerce by reducing delivery costs. The findings of this study have several implications for distribution companies.

In medium and large cities, the delivery of goods represents a significant contribution to the problems of congestion, lack of parking, pollution and energy consumption. The characteristics of this type of transport are also very different from passenger mobility, even though they are often assimilated, due to the lack of specific tools for estimation and analysis, and also of indicators to evaluate improvements in the systems of urban goods distribution. In this work, we start by developing a systematic model to estimate the transport of goods in a city, according to the particularities of its supply and demand. This model can then be used to determine with a high level of detail the contribution of the delivery of goods to the ecological footprint of the city, thus proposed as the key indicator of the efficiency of this type of transport. The work is applied to the city of Seville, in Spain

Container terminals (CTs) are designed to provide support for the continuous changes in container ships. The most common schemes used for dock management are based on discrete and continuous locations. In view of the steadily growing trend in increasing container ship size, more flexible berth allocation planning is mandatory. The consideration of continuous location in the CT is a good option. This article addresses the berth allocation problem with continuous dock, which is called dynamic berth allocation problem. We propose a mathematical model and develop a heuristic procedure, based on a genetic algorithm, to solve the corresponding mixed integer problem. Allocation planning aims to minimize distances traveled by the forklifts and the quay crane, for container loading and unloading operations for each ship, according to the quay crane scheduling. Simulations are undertaken using Arena software, and experimental analysis is carried out for the most important CT in Spain.

The planning of vessel navigation along a tidal river is a complex task that can affect the efficiency of inland ports and intermodal chains. The availability of water may represent a significant restriction to port accessibility, having an impact on waiting times, cost and even safety. This paper presents a heuristic procedure to schedule vessels on a tidal waterway, which seeks to optimise navigation according to a multi-criteria objective function combining the number of vessels serviced, the total waiting time, the waterway occupation time and the number of crossing operations, where the term “crossing” implies inbound and outbound vessels passing each other. The procedure requires a previous step of estimation of real-time water depth, which identifies the critical points or navigation bottlenecks along the waterway, and contemplates the possibility of vessels having to anchor in the middle of their journey and wait for next tide rise. We validate the procedure through its application to a set of real and test problems and show that its results are reliable in terms of performance and solution quality.