A new eco-friendly initiative for last food mile delivery in urban areas

The last food mile delivery involves the final step of delivering food products to the end customers. By developing e-commerce channels, home delivery is considered the final mile of food delivery. However, although home food delivery has received much welcome from consumers, it is still one of the costliest and most polluting segments in the food supply chain, and its optimisation is highly felt. Thus, this paper proposes a new initiative to reduce the environmental impacts of home food deliveries from retailers in urban areas. Last food mile models for both the conventional approach in which each retailer has its own dark store and for a proposed approach in which all retailers have only one common dark store for home food delivery are developed. A Vehicle Route Problem with Time Window (VRPTW) and heterogeneous fleet are developed to minimise both CO2 emission and transportation cost simultaneously and implemented using a simulated annealing algorithm that is programmed in MATLAB software. The obtained results revealed that the proposed initiative's application can significantly impact the reduction of both CO2 emission and transportation costs.