The strategic design and environmental footprint of highly responsive urban distribution networks

With the rise of the on-demand economy and the increasingly high service levels expected by consumers, companies are racing to provide shorter and shorter delivery lead times for e-commerce orders. Two-day deliveries have become the norm in dense urban areas and companies are developing highly responsive urban distribution networks capable of serving consumers in lead times as low as one hour. These changing consumer shopping habits are leading to more fragmented deliveries and increased urban freight activity as it becomes more difficult to consolidate orders. Increased urban freight activity is in-turn leading to more congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and air pollution, harming city residents. In this work, we explore the strategic design of highly responsive urban distribution networks, promising lead times of under two hours, and investigate which operational and environmental parameters drive the deployment of different types of network designs.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Lavenir, Xavier Paul Lister.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Matthias Winkenbach.

• Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127736

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127736