Underground Freight Transportation for Package Delivery in Urban Environments

TL;DR

This paper explores underground freight transportation for last mile delivery, presenting a new network design problem, an exact solution method, and demonstrating significant potential cost and traffic reduction benefits in urban environments.

Contribution

It introduces the nd-UFT network design problem, proves its NP-hardness, and develops an efficient exact solution approach for large-scale instances.

Findings

UFT can remove up to 42% of packages from roads in Chicago.

A 45-mile tunnel network can significantly reduce urban traffic.

UFT offers over 40% cost savings compared to traditional delivery methods.

Abstract

The use of underground freight transportation (UFT) is gaining attention because of its ability to quickly move freight to locations in urban areas while reducing road traffic and the need for delivery drivers. Since packages are transported through the tunnels by electric motors, the use of tunnels is also environmentally friendly. Unlike other UFT projects, we examine the use of tunnels to transport individual orders, motivated by the last mile delivery of goods from e-commerce providers. The use of UFT for last mile delivery requires more complex network planning than for direct lines that have previously been considered for networks connecting large cities. We introduce a new network design problem based on this delivery model and transform the problem into a fixed charge multicommodity flow problem with additional constraints. We show that this problem, the nd-UFT, is NP-hard, and provide an exact solution method for solving large-scale instances. Our solution approach exploits the combinatorial sub-structures of the problem in a cutting planes fashion, significantly reducing the time to find optimal solutions on most instances compared to a MIP. We provide computational results for real urban environments to build a set of insights into the structure of such networks and evaluate the benefits of such systems. We see that a budget of only 45 miles of tunnel can remove 42% of packages off the roads in Chicago and 32% in New York City. We estimate the fixed and operational costs for implementing UFT systems and break them down into a per package cost. Our estimates indicate over a 40% savings from using a UFT over traditional delivery models. This indicates that UFT systems for last mile delivery are a promising area for future research.