Innovative Solutions in Last-Mile Delivery: Integrating the Use of Moving Smart Parcel Stations

In the last decade, e-commerce has been growing consistently. Fostered by the covid pandemic, the online retail growth has gone exponential, with most of industries including food, clothing, groceries among many others proposing online retail. This growth in the online retailing activities has raised very important logistical challenges particularly, the last leg of the distribution commonly referred to as the Last Mile delivery. For instance, the traditional truck-based home delivery has reached its limits within metropolitan areas and cannot be an effective delivery method anymore. Driven by technological progress, several other logistics solutions have been deployed as innovative alternatives to deliver parcels. This includes delivery by drones, smart parcel stations, robots, crowdsourcing among others. In this setting, the aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive review and analysis on the latest trends in last mile delivery solutions taking both industry and academia perspectives. We use a content analysis literature review to analyze over 60 relevant publications and derive the necessary features of the latest innovation in the last mile delivery and point out their different maturity levels as well as the related theoretical and operational challenges. We then propose a real data case study to assess the use of moving smart parcel stations in Doha, Qatar to serve 500 customers over a 6 months period, and evaluate its performance according to different KPIs such as costs and carbon footprints.