Browsing by Author "Tudisco, Vittoria"

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    Sustainable e-grocery home delivery: An optimization model considering on-demand vehicles
    (PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2025) Vittoria Tudisco; Sara Perotti; Banu Yetkin Ekren; Emel Aktas; Perotti, Sara; Tudisco, Vittoria; Aktas, Emel; Ekren, Banu Yetkin
    The e-grocery sector has experienced a significant boost since the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changing consumer buying behaviours. As demand for faster and more efficient delivery options grows e-grocery retailers face increasing pressure to optimize home delivery operations. Collaborations with third-party logistics providers (3PLs) although still overlooked have emerged as promising offering operational flexibility and environmental benefits. This work introduces an optimization model that supports the design of an on-demand delivery fleet conjunctly with delivery routings and schedules while considering both cost and environmental impact. To this aim a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is extended to incorporate on-demand fleet design and three different objective functions embodying a cost-efficient an environmentally-effective and a costenvironmental balanced perspective respectively. Numerical experiments based on an Italian case study show that prioritizing environmental objectives reduces emissions by over 90% with marginal increases in annual costs. Besides on-demand vehicles enable flexibility that facilitates the adoption of sustainable delivery options without requiring challenging investments such as delivery fleet. Several contributions are provided: insights into using on-demand vehicles are proposed, a mathematical model jointly optimizing fleet design and delivery routing and scheduling while considering both costs and environmental objectives is developed and its practical application is demonstrated using real-world data. The findings highlight the significant impact of environmental considerations on fleet composition and operational efficiency offering actionable strategies for e-retailers to reduce emissions while maintaining service quality.