MSCA-COFUND-CLEAR-Doc - PhD Position #CD22-05: Combining rail and autonomous vehicles in cities for first/last mile delivery

Context:

Environmental issues have never been more critical, imposing a strong desire to change consumption and mobility practices to reduce our environmental impact (Asghari et al., 2021). In the context of urban densification and the development of e-commerce, the demand for freight transport has increased significantly in recent years (Cleophas et al., 2019). The European Environment Agency's 2020 study shows that between 2000 and 2017, the demand for passenger transport increased by 17% and freight transport by 24%. It has become crucial today to promote urban rail transport, including freight and passengers, because of its low environmental impact. However, the latter has a disadvantage: it has to be connected to other modes to ensure first/last mile delivery. The autonomous vehicle seems promising for this role, provided its performance and autonomy (Lin et al., 2014).

In this thesis, we consider the integration of the freight component in the urban passenger rail transport system, which has already been the subject of work showing its feasibility and potential (Behiri et al., 2018; Behiri et al., 2022). This thesis aims to consider freight's complete transportation process when integrated into the urban passenger rail transport system. Therefore, we propose using autonomous vehicles as a complementary mode to expand rail transport capacity to achieve the first/last mile delivery. To our knowledge, the literature has not addressed the problem of the optimisation of freight delivery time with this bi-modal urban transportation system.

Literature related works:

Interest in sharing freight and passenger transport has increased over the past five years, offering a wide range of work (Cavallaro & Nocera, 2021). Among these works, many report single or multi-city scale implementations to demonstrate feasibility. Li et al. (2021) investigated the feasibility of using the urban rail mode for freight through two experiments of lines connecting the airport to the city centre, including one in Toronto and the other in Beijing. Moreover, the literature review shows a real deficit in quantitative methods for integrating freight and passenger transport (Chung, 2021).

Regarding the use of autonomous vehicles for the last mile delivery, which is studied in many cases as a vehicle routing problem, we can refer to (Montoya et al., 2015). Also, Agnusdei et al. (2022) state that autonomous delivery vehicles facilitate customer deliveries. In addition, we can mention the work of Mourad et al. (2021), who addressed the problem of goods delivery by robots from nodes served by passenger shuttles also used for goods.

The objective of the thesis:

The first contribution concerns the modelling of the transport solution integrating the second mode of autonomous vehicles to minimise the travelling time of the parcels in the bi-modal system composed of the rail transport first and then the autonomous vehicles for the last mile delivery. We will propose a mathematical model to formalise the joint optimisation problem considering the freight-passenger mutualising rail transport corresponding to the FRTSP (Freight-Rail-Transportation-Scheduling-Problem) (Behiri et al., 2018) and the VRP induced by the rounds of the autonomous vehicles generating several VRPs (Vehicle Routing Problem). Indeed, synchronising goods flow between the two modes implies considering both problems holistically, minimising total travel time - including the transhipment. The second contribution is to validate the solutions provided by the previous analytical model in an uncertain context to consider disturbances such as rail incidents or traffic conditions for the VRP. The coupling should allow the development of a hybrid method to determine a robust solution.

Methodology:

1- Review the literature to identify the works dealing with the last mile on the one hand and the optimisation/simulation coupling for rail and road transport problems on the other hand.

2- Propose a model based on mathematical programming to solve the freight-forwarding problem by considering the transhipment between the FRTSP and the VRP.

3- Propose a hybrid approach to evaluate the performance of the solutions provided by the mathematical model in a fluctuating environment to take into account changes in FRTSP travel times (incidents) or VRP travel times (traffic).

References:

Agence Européenne d’Environnement, 2020. https://www.eea.europa.eu.

G.P. Agnusdei, M.G. Gnoni, F. Sgarbossa, K. Govindann, 2022. Challenges and perspectives of the Industry 4.0 technologies within the last-mile and first-mile reverse logistics: A systematic literature review. Research in Transportation Business & Management, 100896.

M. Asghari, S. M. J. Mirzapour Al-e-hashem, 2021. Green vehicle routing problem: A state-of-the-art review, International Journal of Production Economics, Vol 231, 107899.

W. Behiri, S. Belmokhtar-Berraf, C. Chu, 2018. Urban freight transport using passenger rail network: Scientific issues and quantitative analysis. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Vol 115, 227-245.

W. Behiri, S. Belmokhtar-Berraf, C. Chu, 2022. A robust ant colony metaheuristic for urban freight transport scheduling using passenger rail network. Expert Systems with Applications, 118906.

F. Cavallaro, S. Nocera, 2021. Integration of passenger and freight transport: A concept-centric literature review, Research in Transportation Business & Management.

S. H. Chung, 2021. Applications of smart technologies in logistics and transport: A review. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Vol 153, 102455.

C. Cleophas, C. Cottrill, J. Fabian Ehmke, K. Tierney, 2019. Collaborative urban transportation: Recent advances in theory and practice, European Journal of Operational Research, Vol 273(3), 801-816.

Z. Li, A. Shalaby, M.J. Roorda, B. Mao, 2021. Urban rail service design for collaborative passenger and freight transport. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Vol 147, 102205.

C. Lin, K.L., Choy, G. T. S., Ho, S. H., Chung, H. Y., Lam, 2014. Survey of green vehicle routing problem: Past and future trends. Expert Systems with Applications, Vol 41, 1118–1138.

J.R, Montoya-Torres, J., López Franco, S., Nieto Isaza, H., Felizzola Jiménez, N., Herazo-Padilla, 2015, A literature review on the vehicle routing problem with multiple depots. Computers & Industrial Engineering, Vol 79, 115-129.

A. Mourad, J. Puchinger, T. Van Woensel, 2021. Integrating autonomous delivery service into a passenger transportation system. International Journal of Production Research, Vol 59(7), 2116-2139.