Séminaire de recherche Opérations - "Urban parcel delivery network design at La Poste, state of the art and perspectives" - Johan Leveque, Institut de Mathématique de Bordeaux

With the rise of the e-commerce and the slow decay of mail deliveries, consumers behaviour is slowly moving in favor of the best possible quality of service. This phenomenon has been even more amplified since Covid- 19 outbreak. On the other hand, major historic delivery actors are already well implemented in city centers and try to optimize their own delivery network to answer the future demand. Urban last- mile delivery faces great challenges to satisfy growing customer demand with faster, punctual delivery expectations, under tight budgets and environmental requirements. While a lot of companies are redesigning their urban delivery network by adding optimally positioned micro-hubs to city inner centers, a lot of them are including new delivery methods such as cargo- bike. Sharing the benefits of mutualizing several delivery actor’s network provides a better quality of service by creating a denser network. In this work, we present the passed introduction of cargo bikes and strategic urban network redesign of La Poste over the past years. We also propose a new approach to design a coallitional delivery network design of several delivery actors. This mutualized network follows the idea of Physical Internet (PI), more precisely the concept of Hyperconnected City Logistics (HCL) and reduces line-haul times to the final customer and allows urban cross-docking between all the actors, reducing transit times for each city inner delivery flows by optimizing residual capacities. In particular, this work considers designing a mutualized network allowing deliverers to transfer their parcels to other actors. We propose a new architecture for coallitional hyperconnected urban delivery network through an optimization model minimizing the total delivery cost while restraining the total transit time for a delivery. This gives us a new organization for urban delivery. Second we will discuss the benefits of using a mutualized network for a single delivery actor : the design is sub-optimal for the actor itself leading to higher operating costs but allowing more flexibility and the reach of new service levels. We will finally present an exploration of new delivery methods such as autonomous vehicles and how they could modify the inner strategic structure of delivery networks.