Cost Study On Urban Last Mile Distribution Under Online Shopping

With the rapid development of internet,online shopping has become more and more convenient.This kind of new shopping style is gradually changing people’s consuming habits.However,comparing with the booming online shopping,an increasing number of logistics problems under online shopping are emerging,particularly the “last mile” distribution.“Last mile” distribution is the end link of whole logistics chain,but its cost accounts for more than 30% of all.As the more expensive,least efficient and most polluting part in the whole logistics chain,“last mile” distribution has been the bottlenecks of the further development of online shopping logistics.Therefore,the purposes of this thesis are to extract and analyze the cost drivers of “last mile” distribution to provide the scientific decision-making support of decreasing distribution costs for logistics companies,and finally achieve high-efficient,low-cost,reliable,and high-quality “last mile” distribution service.In the beginning,aming to the whole process of “last mile” distribution,this paper makes a research analysis based on domestic and foreign literatures from the aspects of bottleneck problems,vehicle routing problem,delivery models,return problem and low carbon problem,location of distribution centers and distributing nodes,joint distribution,and distribution cost,and then the eighteen cost drivers are extrated.And then the cost drivers of “last mile” distribution are qualitively analyzed from six perspectives of customer service level（distribution time window,service attitude of couriers,returned goods and parcels security）,vehicle matching and transport problem（the type of delivery vehicles,traffic congestion and traffic accidents,extreme climate and natural disaster）,delivery models（home delivery,collaborative pick-up point,self-support pick-up point,smart locker,joint distribution,crowdsourcing logistics）,information technology,environment problem（CO₂ emission,package and filled stuff）,geographic concentration（customer density,distributing nodes,customer demand）,which provide scientific support for logistics companies to further decrease distribution costs.Based on the establishment of cost model of “last mile” distribution,the specific costs of home delivery,pick-up points and smart locker are quantitively calculated.And the delivey costs of joint distribution under different area coincidence degrees are also qualititvely calculated,and the operational efficiency of joint distribution is evaluated according to the defined joint distribution benefit index.Finally,the distribution costs are qualitively analyzed in eight different scenarios of delivery time window,customer demand,multiple deliveries,the type of delivey vehicle,traffic congestion,CO₂ emission,customer density,network nodes density.