Last-mile deliveries in urban areas often raise environmental and social issues in Singapore and urban cities worldwide. As the e-commerce market and urban logistics spending continues to grow globally (and locally), the social aspect of this trend i.e. congestion and environmental pollution needs to be addressed.

The strategic goal for Urban Logistics is to deliver an eco-system that address the various aspects of collaborative last-mile delivery, from warehouse to consolidation centres to end point (B2C and B2B retail) deliveries.

Conceptual Overview

The Urban Logistics research focuses on developing and implementing solutions for e-commerce fulfilment and last-mile delivery to increase deliveries with improved turnaround time, and improve manpower productivity and reduce congestion in the city:

• Collaborative urban delivery optimisation where data-driven optimisation models are used to generate routes and schedule recommendations to logistic service providers to increase throughput; and
• Crowd-sourced delivery where task-courier recommendation algorithms are used to increase the success rate of matching delivery requests and delivery persons to meet delivery demands.