Parcel Delivery with Automated Parcel Lockers in Bergen: A Study on Potential Collaboration in the Parcel Delivery Industry in Bergen Using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

Automated parcel lockers (APLs) have in the past year become a common sight in Bergen and have quickly become one of the preferred methods for picking up parcels in the business-to-customer market. As the largest postal companies keep increasing their number of APLs, and an increasing number of companies are implementing or exploring the possibilities to implement APLs in their operations, new problems and solutions arise. This thesis focuses on postal companies’ incentives to partake in collaborative efforts regarding APLs by sharing APLs, terminals, or both. We use mixed-integer linear programming to create different network design models to minimize the cost of delivering parcels with APLs for different scenarios. We then assess and compare the incentives to collaborate in the different scenarios by looking at the relative savings for each scenario. The main findings show that the total cost decreases as collaboration and consolidation increase. We found that when companies share APLs and terminals, collaboration results in significantly higher savings when the cost of APLs is low relative to travel cost. However, we did not find that this was the case when companies only share APLs. In scenarios with several smaller companies, there is a higher incentive to collaborate, as collaboration can be valuable for smaller companies as they are less likely to use the full capacity of APLs when operating individually. This was the case when companies shared only APLs and when sharing both APLs and terminals. The further away the terminals are from each other, the larger the benefit of collaboration becomes when sharing terminals and APLs, but not when only sharing APLs. However, the total cost becomes higher when the terminals are placed further away from the city centre. Lastly, we found that it is possible to find several stable cost allocations when the companies share both terminals and APLs.