Last-mile delivery is regarded as an essential, yet challenging problem in city logistics. One of the most common initiatives, implemented to streamline and support last-mile activities, are satellite depots. These intermediate logistics facilities are used by companies in urban areas to decouple last-mile activities from the rest of the distribution chain. Establishing a business model that considers different stakeholders’ interests and balances the economic and operational dimensions, is still a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem that broadly covers such a setting, where the delivery to customers is managed through satellite depots. The interplay and the hierarchical relation between the problem agents are modeled in a bi-level framework. Two mathematical models and an exact solution approach, properly customized for our problem, are presented. To assess the validity of the proposed formulations and the efficiency of the solution approach, we conduct an extensive set of computational experiments on benchmark instances. In addition, we present managerial insights for a case study on parcel delivery in Turin, Italy.

中文翻译：

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使用多颗卫星进行最后一英里交付的双层方法

最后一公里配送被认为是城市物流中一个重要且具有挑战性的问题。为简化和支持最后一英里活动而实施的最常见举措之一是卫星站。城市地区的公司使用这些中间物流设施将最后一英里的活动与分销链的其余部分脱钩。建立考虑不同利益相关者利益并平衡经济和运营维度的商业模式仍然是一个挑战。在本文中，我们介绍了一个广泛涵盖此类设置的新问题，其中通过卫星仓库管理向客户的交付。问题代理之间的相互作用和层次关系在双层框架中建模。提出了针对我们的问题适当定制的两个数学模型和精确的解决方法。为了评估所提出的公式的有效性和解决方案的效率，我们对基准实例进行了广泛的计算实验。此外，我们还提供了意大利都灵包裹递送案例研究的管理见解。