Effect of stochastic travel times in last-mile parcel delivery with

Autonomous electric vehicle

Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the effect of stochastic travel times on the reliability of the routing plan in last-
mile parcel delivery operated by Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) with parcel lockers. This delivery
mode has the potential to dominate regular parcel delivery in urban areas since it is highly attractive and
sustainable for the e-commerce industry. Nevertheless, discrepancies in delivery time have been identified as
having a major negative impact on customer’s experience and by extension to the retailer. To measure the
effect of urban traffic on the routing reliability we first solve the deterministic version of the problem using
a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation. Then, the stochastic version of the problem is solved
by combining Monte Carlo Simulation with a metaheuristic. The main finding is that, when the level of
variability exceeds 30%, to avoid discrepancies in delivery time, the delivery routing plan have to account for
the real traffic state. Then, to minimize the risk of missing the delivery customer’s specified time window,
companies have to invest on optimization tools that includes daily traffic forecast.
Keywords: Autonomous Electric Vehicles, Stochastic Travel Times, Monte Carlo Simulation, Parcel
Delivery.

1. Introduction
Over the last decade, the use of e-commerce around the world has progressed significantly bringing to
customers both flexibility and the services they ask for, whenever and wherever they are. According to
Eurostat (2019), 43% of the European population are accustomed to buying grocery and goods on line. It
is also expected that, by 2025 in the US, about 50 to 60 million parcels will be delivered per day, (Joerss
et al., 2016). To serve these customers, last-mile delivery companies in urban areas are moving towards
delivering at home at the same day and within the specified time window. In order to insure such efficient
last-mile delivery many retail companies like US-based Amazon and Google, and China based Alibaba have
worked on prototypes and trial programs within the parcel delivery market, (Behnke 2019, He et al. 2019).
Specifically three sustainable delivery models are investigated: Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) with
parcel lockers, drones, and bike couriers. According to Mckenzy & Company (Joerss et al., 2016) the use
of AEVs with parcel lockers will dominate regular parcel delivery in urban areas. These vehicles deliver
parcels without any human intervention. Customers purchase an item(s) and choose the desired delivery
time interval. Upon arrival at their door, customers are asked to enter a code in order to pick up the parcel
from the specified locker mounted on the vehicle.
In this context, projects have been launched such as Cepolina and Farina (2015) have proposed to deliver
packages from urban distribution centers to customers using Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) named
FURBOT. Google (2016) have patented a type of AEV where packages are stored in parcel lockers mounted
on the vehicle. A project of on-demand grocery delivery using AEVs named NURO for Fry’s Food stores
in Arizona have been launched in (Robotics Business Review, 2018). Also Neolix, a Chinese self-driving
delivery company has been deploying fleets of its vans to deliver medical and food in Wuhan. With this
growth of interest in using AEVs to assure last-mile parcel delivery, Jaoua et al. (2019) have recently
proposed a strategic decision support system for parcel delivery companies. This tool assists managers in
solving AEVs fleet sizing and composition problems. The considered vehicles deliver individual packages,
on demand, from retailers to different customers. The delivery could be of small goods such as grocery, food
or medicines stored in parcels mounted on the AEVs.
November 13, 2020
 In ( Jaoua et al, 2019) authors have only focus on the strategic problem, thus our herein objective is to
expand their work and address operational level routing decisions. We propose to solve the routing problem
in last-mile delivery based on a fleet of AEVs with parcel lockers. Specifically, we will extend the e-VRP to
solve a new realistic problem for last-mile parcel delivery, the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft
Time Windows and Stochastic Travel Times (E-VRPSTW-STT). Since such AEVs will move in the urban
traffic area, arrival time vary greatly and depend on traffic controls, congestion, road condition, etc. This
uncertainty in travel time makes the problem of serving a customer within the specified time window highly
challenging. According to (Jaoua et al. 2020, Layeb et al. 2018, Taniguchi & Shimamoto 2004) solving
routing problems with the assumption that travel times are deterministic might result in a complete failure
of the transportation planning. Actually, the risk of missing the time window may greatly increase. In the
herein addressed context of e-Commerce industry, delivering the parcel outside of the customer specified
time window may have a major impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, (He et al. 2019). Thus, we
propose to solve the stochastic problem in order to consider realistic traffic condition in urban areas. We
also consider constraints related to battery autonomy and parcels capacity of the AEVs fleet.
For that purpose, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation is proposed to solve the
deterministic E-VRPSTW. Then, the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) Method is used to solve the stochastic
problem. This solving approach is similar to the one used by Gonzalez-Martin et al (2018), when they
addressed the arc-routing problem with stochastic demand by combining MCS with a metaheuristic. We
propose to solve the stochastic case by combining MCS with a Memetic Algorithm that is the result of the
association of the genetic algorithm and a local search. Using such metaheuristic, for solving a deterministic
VRP with Time Windows have been discussed in (Rezgui et al., 2019). In the present work, we consider
the stochastic urban traffic by assuming that travel time follows the skewed Lognormal distribution. Many
research in the transportation field have revealed that empirical travel time data exhibit strong positive
skew, long upper tails and even bimodality (Taylor & Somenahalli 2010, Ji et al 2015). To the best of
our knowledge, and according to Jaoua et al. (2019), the E-VRPSTW-STT has not yet been addressed
in the present context of AEVs with lockers for parcel delivery in urban traffic area. Also Jaoua et al.
(2020), pointed out that for last-mile delivery operation very few works have explicitly account for dynamics
between vehicles and traffic. Thus, we propose to address this stochastic problem based on the MCS method,
which can be applied to any other travel time distribution shape. Extensive computational experiments are
conducted on adopted benchmark instances from the literature to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed
model under uncertainty. Results shown that ignoring the stochastic nature of traffic could considerably
deteriorate the route planning for parcel delivery.
The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, a review of the related literature is presented. Section
3 introduces the notations in detail and provides a mixed-integer linear programming formulation of the
problem. Section 4 discusses the development of the proposed algorithm. The experimental settings and the
empirical results are presented in Section 5. Finally, section 6 concludes the paper and provides directions
for future works.

2. Related works
The future of shared autonomous and electric vehicles is closer to reality than it might appear. Specifi-
cally, for on-demand parcel delivery several studies have examined the deployment of such vehicles(Hattrup-
Silberberg and Glickman, 2016).

Most of the research focuses on groceries, packages or take-out order on-demand for speedy delivery in
static environment. A prominent work introduced by Hoffmann and Prause (2018) for this new paradigm
of packages delivery is the Regulatory Framework for Last-Mile Delivery Robots. This work focuses on
autonomous self-driving package delivery robots which are used for last-mile delivery. Estonia has for
instance already adapted its traffic for the shared use of space for humans and self-driving vehicles. Self-
driving vehicles are bringing groceries to people’s doors and allowing them to pick what they want on
the spot: for a recent review of “autonomous stores”, the reader is directed to (Eliport, 2019) . These
autonomous vehicles are electric and benefit from completely wireless EV charging. Other works introduced
2
by Zhang et al. (2018) focus on the planning problem to right-size an autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs)
fleet while meeting goods transportation demand. This problem incorporates comprehensive considerations
of 1) limited AEV driving range; 2) optimal AEV routing and relocating operations. Numerical experiments
demonstrate that intelligent routing and relocating operations, can significantly affect the economic efficiency
and the planning results of an AEV fleet. The use of such type of vehicles in last-mile delivery gave birth
to a new variant of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the so-called Autonomous Vehicle Routing Problem
which extends the VRP mainly to account for self-driving and electric vehicle features.
Agafonov et al. (2018) developed an approach for an Autonomous Vehicles Routing Problem that allows
to predict traffic in the network and find the shortest path. The authors investigate a route reservation
architecture to manage road traffic within an urban area. Experimental study demonstrate that the results
of the proposed rerouting procedure outperforms results of an uncontrolled traffic behavior in terms of travel
times. Other works extend the automated VRP such as the one by Zhang et al. (2017) which considered
time windows constraints. They introduced the automated vehicle routing problem with time windows which
considers a traffic interruption in the initial stage. Additionally, an improved particle swarm optimisation
algorithm is designed to solve this problem. A case study is undertaken to test the validity of the model and
the algorithm. Numerical results proved that the use of automated vehicles in city logistics offers a huge
improvement in efficiency and other benefits.
Work on stochastic routing for autonomous vehicles is limited. Ulmer and Streng (2019) suggested
dynamic delivery with autonomous vehicles. In their work, the authors analyze the potential of combining
parcel pickup stations and autonomous vehicles for same-day deliveries. They denote the resulting problem
as the Stochastic Dynamic Dispatching Problem for same day delivery with Pickup Stations and Autonomous
Vehicles. For same day delivery, vehicles are assigned dynamically to deliver goods from a depot to customers.
The customer requests are stochastic and follow a known probability distribution. Instead of delivering
parcels individually to customers at their homes, deliveries are made to a nearby pickup parcel station.
Another problem that is closely related to the use of the autonomous vehicles was introduced by Cepolina
and Farina (2015). The authors examined the use of (AEVs) for reducing the externalities due to the freight
delivery operations. The problem concerns a methodology for delivering packages directed to consumers
while minimizing the overall traveled distance taking into account the boxes position for the packages, and
the consolidation of packages in the boxes. Each AEV has the capacity of two boxes. The boxes are divided
into modular parcels. Then each box is addressed to an unloading bay and it is delivered there by small
vans, called FURBOT. Their problem can be reformulated as a Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. One
interesting assumption focuses on the recharge process of the FURBOT vehicle. The authors assumed that
the battery duration is sufficient for the vehicle to perform the most consuming delivery trip. A genetic
algorithm for determining the optimal delivery routes of the AEVs has been proposed.
Recently Jaoua et al. (2019) presented a strategic Decision Support System for on-demand parcel delivery
based on a fleet of AEVs. The considered fleet is based on the AEV patented by Google (2016), with packages
stored in parcel lockers mounted on the vehicle. A simulation-based optimization approach is developed to
evaluate the performance of the designed system. The authors provide strategic guidelines for the design of
the on-demand parcel delivery system. They consider the issue of determining the appropriate fleet size in
various operational and infrastructure configurations.
From this literature review, we can see that generally the stochastic nature of the travel time in urban
areas is not addressed. However, many research studies on VRP in city logistics (Tas et al. 2013, Miranda
& Conceiçao 2016, Nasri et al. 2018) have demonstrated that the solution of the deterministic routing
problems deteriorates once applied to real-world problems. Also in (Jaoua et al. 2020), authors shown that
the risk of missing the Time Window increase when the shape of the travel time probability distribution is
ignored. Thus, in this work, we propose to solve the E-VRPSTW-STT by combining MCS with a Memetic
Algorithm. This resolution approach of combining MCS with a metaheuristic to cope with the stochastic
variant of the problem, has already been successfully applied in the context of arc routing problem with
stochastic demand (Gonzalez-Martin et al. 2018). Then our objective is to apply this resolution approach
to our problem to reach reliable routing plan of AEVs in parcel delivery context with stochastic travel time.
This leads to a new class of routing problems, which considers all the constraints linked with the electric
vehicles, transporting parcels to be delivered, capacity issues and timing. In what follows, we present a
3
mathematical formulation for the E-VRPSTW-STT.

3. Problem formulation

In this section, we propose to model the problem of routing a fleet of autonomous electric vehicles
with soft time windows and stochastic travel times. Formally, the problem can be stated as follows: let
G = (N, A) be a complete directed graph where N denotes a set of customers. Further, let nodes 0 and
n + 1 represent the depot node, thus N = {0} ∪ {1, , , , n} ∪ {n + 1}. Then, let A ⊆ N × N , denotes the arc
set with A = {(i, j) |i, j ∈ N, i 6= j}. Each arc (i, j) is associated with a travel cost cij , a distance dij and a
travel time tij . Note that cij is linked and can be replaced by multiplying the expected travel time E[tij ]
on arc (i, j) and the variable cost ct . Each vehicle, when it crosses an arc, consumes the amount e.dij of
the remaining battery charge, where e denotes the energy consumption per unit of traveled distance. Three
decision variables are used: a binary variable xij indicates that a vehicle travels from customer i to customer
p
j. zij specifies that a vehicle transports the parcel p from customer i to customer j. λpi is a binary decision
variable which indicates whether customer i receives the parcel p.
A fleet of homogeneous vehicles with a capacity Q is stationed at the depot. Before leaving, each electric
vehicle must be fully charged at the maximum recharge quantity B. A customer located at node i ∈ N
has a positive demand qi , a service time si , a time window [ai , bi ]. For this stochastic VRP with soft time
windows, we assume that the service at customers can start before or after the time windows, whereby an
early arrival is penalized because of the waiting time before the beginning of the service and a late arrival
penalty is incurred in case of delayed service.
The definitions and notations leading to our mathematical formulation are summarized in Table 1.

4
 Table 1: Parameters and variables of the model
Table 1 Parameters
0, n + 1 Depot nodes
N Set of customers
V Set of vehicles
P Set of parcels
dij Distance between nodes i and j
tij Travel time between nodes i and j
qi Demand of customer i
ai Earliest start-window of customer i
bi Latest start-window of customer i
si Service time at customer i
Q Vehicle capacity
vp Volume of parcel p
cp Penalty cost if the service starts after or before the time window
ct Variable cost per unit of time for a vehicle
ε Threshold is a maximum distance between two nodes of the distribution network.
cij Travel cost of a vehicle traversing the pair (i, j)
e Energy consumption per unit of traveled distance
w Energy recharging cost per unit of time
B Battery capacity
Variables
τi Time variable specifying the time of arrival of the vehicle at customer i
yi Variable specifying the state of charge of the vehicle at customer i
Decision variables
xij Binary decision variable indicating that a vehicle travels from customer i to customer j
p
zij Binary decision variable specifying if a vehicle transports the parcel p from customer i
to customer j
λpi Binary decision variable indicating if customer i receives the parcel p

Let li be the random variable denoting the random starting time for node i. The penalty can be
considered as a compensation for customer i as a result of a delayed or early service:

τi , if τi < ai
li = (1)
τi , if τi > bi .
The electric VRP with Soft Time Windows and Stochastic Travel Times can be formulated as a mixed
integer linear programming. The objective function (2) of the problem consists in minimizing the total
expected costs including the one linked with the total expected travel time of the employed vehicles in a
given day and the penalty costs in case of a delay or earliness in the delivery.

X X X
minE[f (x)] = min ct E[tij ]xij + cp ( E[max{lj − bj , 0}] + E[max{aj − lj , 0}]) (2)
i∈N0 ,j∈Nn+1 ,i6=j j∈N j∈N

The minimization of the costs is subject to the following constraints linked with typical constraints for
the VRPTW and specific constraints to handle when dealing with autonomous electric vehicle that deliver
parcels. We introduce first the series of constraints which are due to the nature of the classical VRP
problems. X
xij = 1 ∀i ∈ N (3)
j∈Nn+1 ,i6=j

Constraint (3) specifies that each customer is served exactly once and exactly by one vehicle.
5
 X
xij ≤ 1 ∀i ∈ N (4)
j∈Nn+1 ,i6=j

Constraint (4) ensures that a customer node has at most one successor node: a customer or the depot.
X X
xij − xji = 0 ∀j ∈ N (5)
i∈N0 ,i6=j i∈Nn+1 ,i6=j

Furthermore, constraint (5) stipulates that for each node, the number of arrivals must be equal to the number
of departures. The VRPSTW generalizes the VRP by associating travel times tij with each arc (i, j) and
service times si and time windows [ai , bi ] with customer i. The series of inequalities (6) and (7) expresses
the timing constraints. We introduce the variable τi to indicate when the vehicle arrives at customer i.

τi + (si + tij )xij − b0 (1 − xij ) ≤ τj ∀i ∈ N0 , ∀j ∈ Nn+1 , i 6= j (6)

In constraint (6) we ensure that the starting time τj at node j considers the starting time τi at the preceding
node i plus the service time si to which is added the travel time tij , taking into account that this node can
be a customer or the depot.
The following series of inequalities are linked with the benefits of transporting parcels to be delivered
and capacity issues. We can write these as:
X p
λpi ≤ zij ∀p ∈ P, ∀i ∈ N (7)
j∈N,i6=j

Constraint (7) ensures that if customer i receives the parcel p, then the vehicle has first to leave customer
i before serving the next customer j.
X
vp λpi ≤ Q ∀i ∈ N (8)
p∈P

Constraint (8) guarantees that the vehicle capacity Q is not exceeded. These adding constraints are
inspired from the works in reference (Chen et al. 2017, Cepolina and Farina 2015). In this paper, we
address the problem of serving a set of customers, within fixed time windows, by using AEVs to deliver
parcels.
Adding electric constraints are described by inequalities (9) to (11). These constraints refer to the work
in (Rezgui et al. 2019, Schneider et al. 2014, Aggoune-Mtalaa et al. 2015), which handle also electric
constraints.

ε ≤ yj ≤ yi − (e.dij )xij + B(1 − xij ) ∀i ∈ N0 , ∀j ∈ Nn+1 , i 6= j (9)

Constraint (9) ensures that the charge level of the vehicle at node j depends on the energy consumed
when it crosses the arc (i, j) and must not fall below a given threshold.

ε ≤ yj ≤ B − (e.dij )xij ∀i ∈ N0 , ∀j ∈ Nn+1 , i 6= j (10)

Constraint (10) specifies that the State Of Charge at node j is equal to the maximum load of the battery
minus the charge consumed along each arc (i, j).
τi + tij xij + w(B − yi ) + (b0 + wB)(1 − xji ) ≤ τj ∀i ∈ N0 , ∀j ∈ Nn+1 , i 6= j (11)
Constraint (11) ensures that the recharging duration depends on the remaining energy at the customer
i, the energy capacity of the vehicle B and the recharging rate w.

xij ∈ {0, 1} ∀i ∈ N0,j ∈ Nn+1 , i 6= j (12)

Finally, binary variables are defined in constraint (12).

6
4. The solving approach

This section presents the solving approach based on coupling a Memetic Algorithm (MA) and a Monte
Carlo Simulation (MCS). During the past decade, metaheuristics have been successfully applied to solve
the deterministic VRP with Time Windows (Braÿsy & Gendreau 2008). The effectiveness of using such
metaheuristic algorithm to solve VRP problem have been shown in (Kim & Bae, 2016). In the present work
we address the VRP with Soft Time Windows and Stochastic Travel Times. For that purpose we use the
Monte Carlo Simulation sampling-based approach that has been used successfully to account for uncertainty
to solve stochastic problems (Miranda & Conceiçao 2016, der Linde 2015).

4.1. Memetic algorithm

In this section, we use a typical Memetic Algorithm (MA) for solving the stochastic problem. Different
features need to be carefully considered in order to achieve good results. Among these features, one could
consider the chromosome or solution representation, the fitness function which defines the quality of a
solution and the crossover and mutation operators. As an initial solution, we use a simple representation
in which a solution is an array of n customer nodes which are served by the vehicles. Once individuals
are created, they are ranked as per their fitness value calculated as the sum of the total expected cost
involving the travel costs and the penalties for the delays or earliness in the delivery process. According to
the results from the evaluation function, a new population is created after having applied operators such as
the Tournament selection one and the Partially-Mapped Crossover (PMX) (Karakatic & Podgorelec 2014).
This latter is one of the most efficient operator for a fast convergence towards the optimum. Finally, the
performance of the MA is enhanced by a local search technique to intensify the child quality obtained with
the crossover operator. The metaheuristic approach that we implement is described in Algorithm 1. More
details on this algorithm for classical VRP problems are given in (Rezgui et al., 2019).

Algorithm 1 : Pseudocode for the Memetic Algorithm (Network Topology of a VRP with soft Time
Windows using autonomous electric vehicles: T , List of Trips to serve N customers)
1: Construct the graph G based on T and N ;
2: Initialize-parameter();
3: Generate an initial population (P op) ;
4: while Termination criterion not reached do
5: for all Individuals in the population do
6: P arent1 ← Select(P op);
7: P arent2 ← Select(P op);
8: C ← Apply PMX crossover (P arent1, P arent2, P c) /*Crossover to get an offspring solution*/
9: M ← Local Search(C) /*Improve C with 2-opt heuristic */
10: if M is the best then
11: Population Updating (P op, M );
12: end if
13: end for
14: end while
15: individual ← best-individual(P op);

4.2. Monte Carlo Simulation approach

In the present work to account for realistic traffic, i.e. stochastic travel times, the expected cost of
the objective function (2) is approximated by a Monte Carlo Simulation approach. Given M independent
1 2 M
samples, each of Size N , let fN , fN , ..., fN denote the objectives functions of the associated stochastic
1 2 M
problems and x b ,x
b , ..., x
b the candidate solutions. Let
M
1 X m m
fbN = f (b
x , Sh (P )) (13)
M m=1 N

denote the average of the values of the optimal solutions, where P is the set of stochastic parameters, in our
problem the mean travel times. Sh (P ) represents the h-th sampling of the stochastic parameters, where M
7
denotes the number of evaluations of the solution on a random sampling of travel times. More precisely, to
generate the sample, we use the log-normal distribution to model the travel time for each edge.
In the following, Figures 1, 2 and 3, three examples of travel time data we used to simulate travel time
from Depot to Customer 3. For these three histograms, we have the same mean travel time equal to 22.36.
We also assume three different levels of variability i.e. Coefficient of Variation (CV), a low, medium and high
CV of respectively 10%, 30% and 60%. Recall that the CV is the standard deviation divided by the mean.
The objective herein is to reproduce a realistic level of variability encountered in empirical study in urban
areas. For example in (Taylor & Somenahalli, 2010), the CV of collected travel time is very often higher than
30% and in some urban road route could reach 77%. This variability is due to many factors such as traffic
regulation and controls, the road network infrastructure, etc. According to Jaoua et al. (2020), for reliable
route planning the shape of travel time probability distribution must be considered. Otherwise, modelling
travel time variability with only the mean and CV increases the risk of missing the time window. Thus, for
more reliable routing we use MCS to reproduce the shape of the Log-normal travel time distribution with
different CV level.

Figure 1: Histogram of travel time Figure 2: Histogram of travel time Figure 3: Histogram of travel time
following Log-normal distribution with following Log-normal distribution with following Log-normal distribution with
cv=0.1. cv=0.3. cv=0.6.

5. Computational results

5.1. Experimental setup

We performed all the tests on a laptop PC equipped with an Intel Core i3-3217U Processor clocked at
1.8 GHz with 4 GB RAM, running Windows 10 Professional. The MA was implemented as a single thread
code in Java Virtual Machine (JVM) version 1.6.
Since there is no standard benchmarks for the electric stochastic vehicle routing problem, we have
generated specific benchmark instances, in order to enable comparison between various developed solution
methods. These benchmarks are build upon the ones from Solomon (Solomon, 1987). In our experiments,
we consider the R1 category with 25 customers, in which the geographical data is randomly generated and
the travel time of each pair of edges in the VRPSTW are Lognormally distributed. The service time of each
customer is given as 10 time units in the R1 sets. In these instances, it is assumed that the time is given
in minutes. All the vehicles are available at the depot. The capacity of each vehicle is 200 units. Basic
information about these benchmark data is described at the website http://w.cba.neu.edu/~msolomon/
problems.htm. The sample size N used to calculate the solution is set to 100 where the sample size M used
to evaluate the solution is set to 1000.
Based on the characteristics stated in a previous section, we choose the log-normal distribution to model
the travel time for each edge. More precisely, let X be the random variable which represents the travel time
tij from the customer i to the customer j, following the log-normal distribution. The location parameter µi
and the scale parameter σi are calculated with the following two expressions:

1 V ar[X]
µi = ln(E[X]) − ln(1 + ) (14)
2 E[X]2
V ar[X]
σi2 = ln(1 + ) (15)
E[X]2
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 The vehicle speed is considered unitary, its value is equal to 1km/min in all instances, therefore the
travel time tij and the travel distance dij have the same values. Hence, for each instance, the value of the
mean travel time E[X] is equal to the euclidean distance between the two customers calculated with their
coordinates. The last parameters are linked with the battery. We suppose that each AEV is fully charged
at the maximum recharge quantity before leaving the depot. The battery capacity is set to the maximum
B = 80kW h. Furthermore, we set the consumption rate e to be equal to 1.0.

5.2. Illustrative example

This section illustrates the application of the proposed algorithm on a simple numerical example with
ten customers.

5.2.1. Results for deterministic case

We first implement our proposed MILP model in the commercial solver Cplex to find the optimal de-
terministic route and to validate our approach. The heuristic was tested on Solomons R101 problem. The
feature of the instance is described in table 2. This VRP with Soft Time Windows and deterministic travel
times consists in finding the least number of routes which start at the depot and visit a set of customers
N = 1, 2...10 present at different locations. The customers are served by a homogeneous and limited fleet of
vehicles. Each vehicle has an identical parcels-capacity equal to 200, we recall that here the vehicles have
also a limited battery B = 80.

Table 2: Feature of the R101 instance

Nodes X.Coord Y.Coord Demand Edge Battery Earliest Due Service Travel Arrival P1 P2
capacity time time time time time τi > b i τi < a i
0 35 35 0 - 80 0 230 0 - - - -
3 55 45 13 0-3 77.76 116 126 10 22.36 22.36 0.00 93.64
4 55 20 19 3-4 75.26 149 159 10 25 57.36 0.00 91.64
1 41 49 10 4-1 72.04 161 171 10 32.20 99.56 0.00 61.44
10 30 60 16 1-10 70.52 124 134 10 15.15 125.11 0.00 0
0 35 35 0 10-0 80 0 230 0 25.49 160.60 0.00 0
7 20 50 5 0-7 77.87 81 91 10 21.21 21.21 0.00 59.79
5 15 30 26 7-5 75.80 34 44 10 20.61 51.82 7.82 0
6 25 30 3 5-6 74.80 99 109 10 10 71.82 0.00 27.18
8 10 43 9 6-8 72.81 95 105 10 19.84 101.66 0.00 0
9 55 60 16 8-9 68.00 97 107 10 48.1 159.76 52.76 0
2 35 17 7 9-2 63.26 50 60 10 47.42 217.18 157.18 0
0 35 35 0 2-0 61.64 0 230 0 18 245.18 15.18 0
305.78 232.94 333.69

Each customer located at a node i ∈ N in the column denoted Nodes has a geographic location given by
the two coordinates in the columns X.Coord and Y.coord. To this customer is associated a positive demand
qi (see the column Demand), a Service Time si and a time window [ai , bi ] readable in the two columns
Earliest Time and Due Time. Each edge (i, j) in the column denoted Edge has a positive travel time tij
(that appears in the column Travel Time). Each traveled edge consumes the amount e ∗ dij of the remaining
battery charge of the AEV traveling the edge, where e denotes the constant charge consumption rate (see
the Column titled ”Battery capacity”).
Let τi be a vehicle’s arrival time at customer i. If τi > bi respectively if τi < ai , a penalty P1 respectively
P2 is incurred. We first solve the deterministic version of our model with the commercial solver CPLEX
12.6 to obtain the minimal expected cost. A solution to this problem is shown in figure 4, where 2 vehicles
starting from a central depot serve 10 customers. The first vehicle departs from node 0 (depot) at the
moment 0 and travels 22.36 minutes until arriving at customer 3. Because the vehicle arrives too early at
this customer (the earliest time is 116, see table 2), a penalty which is equal to 93.64 is incurred for early
servicing. When it reaches this customer, it remains in service 10 minutes. Then it leaves customer 3 at
23.36 minutes, travels 25 minutes until it arrives at customer 4 at time 57.36 minutes. There, the arrival
time 57.36 is inferior to 159, so there is no penalty for late servicing. But there is again a penalty for early
arrival equal to 91.64, due to the waiting. This calculation of the costs is operated until all the remaining

9
customers have been visited. The total expected cost or the Expected Value (EV ) of this solution , is
872.41(=305.78 +232.94 + 333.69) which is the sum of the mean travel time for the two vehicles and the
total penalty costs.

Figure 4: Example of a solution of the deterministic problem using two vehicles.

5.2.2. Results for stochastic case

In this section, we will demonstrate the effect of the stochastic traffic, commonly found in urban road
network. Once the deterministic routes have been generated and the arrival times are obtained, the VRP
with soft time windows is transformed into a stochastic problem in which each travel time tij is generated
according to the log-normal distribution. The travel time from the customer i to the customer j in trans-
formed according to formulas (14) and (15). In order to illustrate the importance of considering uncertainty
in the problem formulation, we use the Value of the Stochastic Solution, (V SS), indicator. This measure
is commonly used in stochastic programming, to assess to which extent the deterministic solution could be
used in stochastic environment (Birge 1982, Layeb et al. 2018). The VSS is calculated as the difference
between the Expected result of using Expected Value (EEV ) and the solution of the recourse problem (RP ),
as follows:

¯ = min f (E[x])], we define RP= E[f (x∗)] the solution of the recourse
Given x∗ = min E[f (x)] and x∗
¯ the Expected result of using Expected Value. The value of the stochastic
problem and the EEV = f (E[x∗])
solution is then computed as:

V SS = EEV − RP = minE[f (x)] − minf (E[x])

Where f is the objective function of the problem (in this work it is given by the formula (2)).

In a first stage, obtaining V SS means calculating EEV and RP . This can be obtained as follows:
ˆ Solve the related average problem, the Expected (or mean) Value problem, EV by the Branch and
Bound technique used by Cplex
ˆ Calculate The expected result of using the EV solution to obtain EEV

ˆ Solve the stochastic problem in which a decision maker needs to determine x∗ to minimize expected
costs, the RP .
To start with, let us calculate the EEV . The measurement method of this parameter differs from the work
of (Gauvin et al., 2014) who consider the EEV as the optimal solution of the deterministic VRP. Since
we assume that the expected travel times are equal to their corresponding deterministic values (Euclidean
distance), the EEV is the expected result of the expected value solution of deterministic VRPSTW found
10
by the Branch and Bound technique counterpart. In this section, an illustration of the measurement method
is given.
Let us first suppose that the ten customers in figure 4 have to be served within their relative time window.
The resulting routes are now executed in a stochastic environment. Let dij be the distance between two
customers, the travel time tij is a log-normal distribution with an average E[tij ]=dij . The standard deviation
is defined as std[tij ] = CV [0.1; 0.6] ∗ E[tij ] and the variance var = std[tij ] ∗ std[tij ] where CV [0.1; 0.6] is a
coefficient of variation.
The tables 3, 4 and 5 show the data associated with the routes for serving the ten customers. For the
sake of simplicity, we adopted a notation for the stochastic problem. The table rows refer respectively to:
Nodes, which represent the customers visited by each vehicle in the solution reported in figure 4. The rows
ai and bi represent the earliest time and due time of each customer, E[ti ], represent the euclidean distance
between the two customers according to their coordinates, std[tij ], represent the standard deviation which
is obtained by multiplying E[ti ] by the coefficient of variation CV . var represent the variance and finally
the two last rows represent the two parameters µi and σi which are, respectively, the location parameter
and the scale parameter of the log normal distribution.

Table 3: Example of a transformed VRP with stochastic travel times with cv=0.1
Nodes 0 3 4 1 10 0 7 5 6 8 9 2 0
ai 0 116 149 161 124 0 81 34 99 95 97 50 0
bi 230 126 159 171 134 230 91 44 109 105 107 60 230
E[tij ] - 22.36 25 32.2 15.55 25.49 21.21 20.61 10 19.84 48.1 47.42 18
std[tij ] - 2.236 2.5 3.22 1.555 2.549 2.121 2.061 1 1.984 4.81 4.742 1.8
µi - 3.10 3.21 3.46 2.73 3.23 3.04 3.02 2.29 2.98 3.86 3.85 2.88
σi - 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.29 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09

Table 4: Example of a transformed VRP with stochastic travel times with cv=0.3
Nodes 0 3 4 1 10 0 7 5 6 8 9 2 0
ai 0 116 149 161 124 0 81 34 99 95 97 50 0
bi 230 126 159 171 134 230 91 44 109 105 107 60 230
E[tij ] - 22.36 25 32.2 15.55 25.49 21.21 20.61 10 19.84 48.1 47.42 18
std[tij ] - 6.708 7.5 9.66 4.665 7.647 6.363 6.183 3 5.952 14.43 14.226 5.4
µi - 3.06 3.17 3.42 2.70 3.19 3.01 2.98 2.25 2.94 3.83 3.81 2.84
σi - 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29

Table 5: Example of a transformed VRP with stochastic travel times with cv=0.6
Nodes 0 3 4 1 10 0 7 5 6 8 9 2 0
ai 0 116 149 161 124 0 81 34 99 95 97 50 0
bi 230 126 159 171 134 230 91 44 109 105 107 60 230
E[tij ] - 22.36 25 32.2 15.55 25.49 21.21 20.61 10 19.84 48.1 47.42 18
std[tij ] - 6.708 15 19.32 9.33 15.294 12.726 12.366 6 11.904 28.86 28.452 10.8
µi - 2.95 3.06 3.31 2.59 3.08 2.90 2.87 2.14 2.83 3.71 3.70 2.73
σi - 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.55

Each route with corresponding CV value was replicated 1000 times. The EEV values of each simulation
are shown in table 6. The EEV value of the transformed VRP with stochastic travel times with cv: 0.1,
0.3 and 0.6 are respectively EEVCV =0.1 = 996.63, EEVCV =0.3 = 1011.97 and EEVCV =0.6 = 1043.70.
In the following, we discuss the search process to find the value of the recourse problem RP . Let us
suppose that two vehicles are available at the depot. Figure 5, 6 and 7 describe three different solutions
obtained by solving the stochastic problem (described in section 3) using autonomous electric vehicles in a
urban environment.

11
Figure 5: An example of routes with Figure 7: An example of routes with
stochastic travel time with CV =0.1. Figure 6: An example of routes with stochastic travel time with CV =0.6.
stochastic travel time with CV =0.3.

Let x∗ be the optimal solution obtained by solving problem (2) using the Memetic Algorithm. For each
solution described above, we performed a stochastic simulation using the MCS to estimate the expected cost
of the objective function E[f (x∗)] with different values for CV , which refer to the RP . The RP values of
each solution corresponding to the networks are then equal to RPCV =0.1 = 888.40, RPCV =0.3 = 894.18 and
RPCV =0.6 = 899.25. More details are reported in table 6.
Table 6 presents an overview of the results. The table columns refer respectively to: the expected value
of the deterministic problem (EV) (this cost is divided into two: the total travel cost of the routes and the
penalty cost in case of delay in the delivery or earlier arrival at a customer), the Coefficient of variation
(CV), the route of each stochastic solution with the corresponding CV (Path), the Expected result of using
Expected Value (EEV), the recourse problem (RP), the value of the stochastic solution (VSS) and the rel-
ative V SSr = V SS∗100
RP . This value indicates the percentage of the total cost reduction (VSS) compared to
the RP solution.

Table 6: Testing results using different values of the coefficient of variation

Deterministic Solution V SS∗100
CV EEV Path RP EEV-RP(VSS)
Routing Penalty cost EV RP

0.1 904.32 0-1-6-10-2-0 888.40 15.92 1.76

0-4-9-7-5-3-8-0
305.78 566.63 872.41
0.3 1011.97 0-6-7-0 894.18 117.79 13.17
0-1-5-4-8-3-9-10-2-0

0.6 1043.70 0-1-8-3-5-9-10-2-0 899.25 144.45 16.06

0-7-6-4-0

The above input data corresponds to the results of the feasible solution reported in Table 2. In the
first step when the CV is equal to 0.1 we obtain the following path 0-1-6-10-2-0-4-9-5-3-8-0. With an EEV
equal to 904.32. In the second step we provide the results of our MA approach that is based on stochastic
data to obtain the solution of the recourse problem denoted RP . In this case, the corresponding stochastic
cost RP is equal to 888.40. Consequently, we obtain a reduction of 15.92. The V SSr here is defined as the
percentage of the total cost reduction of the EEV minus RP , which means the benefit of using a stochastic
model instead of the deterministic model. The V SSr in this case is equal to 1.76%. In an additional series of
experiments, if we increase the CV to 0.3 the V SSr increases to 13.17, and when the CV is equal to 0.6, the
V SSr increases to 16.06%. We can conclude that when CV is high, the V SS increases which indicates that
the deterministic routing plan becomes unreliable. In fact using this deterministic solution in the stochastic
environment where the CV is equal to 0.6, increases the total cost by 16.06%. This transportation total
cost increase is mainly due to the penalty of missing the delivery time window. Thus for a more reliable
solution it is better to solve the stochastic version of the problem. In the next section, we will address more
general instances.
12
5.3. Experimental results
In this section, we evaluate the performance of our resolution approach on solving the transformed
instance R1 from Solomon (Solomon, 1987). In our experiments, we consider the R1 category with 25
customers, in which the geographical data are randomly generated and the travel time of each pair of edges
in the VRPSTW are Lognormally distributed.
In this computational analysis, we first apply our approach to the deterministic version of the last-mile
on-demand parcel delivery problem. Computational results in tables 7, 8 and 9 show the result computed
to the stochastic problem. We tested and analysed solutions with different values of CV to assess the effect
of variability level on the solution reliability.
Table 7 illustrates the stochastic behavior of the model. In the literature, other authors (Gauvin et al.
2014) consider only the optimal solution of the standard deterministic routing problem. In this work, we
report results for instances for which we construct the graph and obtain a feasible solution. We consider soft
time windows for the deterministic VRPTW, where customers can be served at any time but with possible
penalties. A branch and bound method is first proposed where deterministic data are supposed. We report
the path and the total expected cost, including the travel cost and the penalty cost for each instance. Note
that the EEV for each problem set corresponds to the expected result of EV . Next, we consider results for
lognormal-distributed travel times, with tij ∼ Lognormal (µi , σi ). A memetic approach is proposed therefore
where stochastic data are assumed. For each case, we changed the travel time of all edges by a random value
tij by setting E[tij ] to be equal to the euclidean distance between two nodes. Then, a sampling approach
is designed that allows for dealing with stochastic travel times for each instance set in order to obtain the
values for the recourse problem RP . To better understand the influence of the CV on the stochastic travel
time, the V SS are calculated as a measure of the value of implementing a stochastic optimization model
instead of the deterministic one.
A first analysis of the results presented in Table 7, showed that when the CV = 0.1 the V SS is low.
Small changes in the travel time did, however, lead to the worst value of the V SS. In some cases the value
of the solution of the recourse problem (RP ) and the expected result of using expected value (EEV ) can
be the same. Following these observations, the V SSr values vary between 0.37% and 2.40%. Indeed, as
an example, for the R105 instance, the EEV is equal to 1629.31 against the RP which cost is equal to
1623.22. The stochastic model showed the reduction of 6.08 of RP cost compared with the deterministic
model. Therefore, the V SS induces a small reduction of the V SSr = 0.37%. For this case of low variability,
we have a small V SS that the deterministic solution is sufficient we do not need to solve the stochastic
version. However, when the CV is higher as for instance CV ≥ 10%, the V SSr increase that means that
solving the deterministic problem lead to unreliable routing plan.
As shown in Table 8, for all the tested cases the V SSr can be as high as 13.32% of the optimal stochastic
cost. For instance, results show that the travel time uncertainty induces a variation of the V SSr between
3.64% and 13.32%. We also notice that the choice of the lognormal distribution for the travel times deterio-
rates in average the solution from 3.64% to 13.32% when the CV increases from 10% to 30%. This is in line
with other studies related to freight transportation problems already conducted by Wang et al. (2016) and
Wang & Wallace (2016), where they found that when the CV , exceeds, 30%, the V SS can be high which
indicates a bad deterministic solution.
Results with a CV of 60% are presented in Table 9. We also see that the average of the total cost reduction
of the V SSr increases to 28.64% (V SS ≡ 243) for the R108 instance. That means that the deterministic
solution is unreliable, and the transportation cost increases due to the penalty for missing the delivery time
window.

13
 Table 7: Testing results for the R1 problem class with CV =0.1.
Expected Value V SS∗100
Instance Path EEV RP EEV-RP(VSS)
Routing Penalty Total RP

R101 5 617.74 1499.81 2117.56 2130.08 2121.11 8.96 0.42

R102 4 576.63 997.17 1573.81 1594.84 1578.40 16.43 1.04
R103 4 520.14 728.29 1248.44 1264.05 1252.49 11.55 0.92
R104 3 473.31 637.87 1111.18 1133.83 1121.87 11.95 1.06
R105 6 559.6 1060.04 1619.63 1629.31 1623.22 6.08 0.37
R106 4 497.88 655.08 1152.96 1174.19 1164.05 10.13 0.87
R107 4 490.86 485.90 976.76 1000.72 988.55 12.16 1.23
R108 4 493.29 330.92 825.29 850.11 830.10 20.00 2.40
R109 5 504.67 709.28 1213.96 1225.91 1221.63 4.27 0.35
R110 4 487.77 624.46 1112.23 1142.39 1128.35 14.03 1.24
R111 5 507.03 907.34 1414.37 1433.75 1415.18 18.56 1.31
R112 3 472.81 448.81 921.69 954.98 940.07 14.90 1.58
Average 1.06

Table 8: Testing results for the R1 problem class with CV =0.3.

Expected Value V SS∗100
Instance Path EEV RP EEV-RP(VSS)
Routing Penalty Total RP

R101 5 617.74 1499.81 2117.56 2203.55 2126.11 77.43 3.64

R102 4 576.63 997.17 1573.81 1672.68 1586.41 86.26 5.43
R103 4 520.14 728.29 1248.44 1317.73 1259.08 58.64 4.65
R104 3 473.31 637.87 1111.18 1200.64 1123.12 77.51 6.90
R105 6 559.6 1060.04 1619.63 1736.21 1627.21 108.99 6.69
R106 4 497.88 655.08 1152.96 1248.88 1170.63 78.24 6.68
R107 4 490.86 485.90 976.76 1146.96 1012.12 134.83 13.32
R108 4 493.29 330.92 825.29 939.24 836.95 102.28 12.22
R109 5 504.67 709.28 1213.96 1298.07 1233.30 64.76 5.25
R110 4 487.77 624.46 1112.23 1203.85 1132.72 71.12 6.27
R111 5 507.03 907.34 1414.37 1511.47 1425.38 86.08 6.03
R112 3 472.81 448.81 921.69 1045.79 944.38 101.40 10.73
Average 7.32

Table 9: Testing results for the R1 problem class with CV =0.6.

Expected Value V SS∗100
Instance Path EEV RP EEV-RP(VSS)
Routing Penalty Total RP

R101 5 617.74 1499.81 2117.56 2294.29 2130.53 163.75 7.68

R102 4 576.63 997.17 1573.81 1778.36 1590.77 187.58 11.79
R103 4 520.14 728.29 1248.44 1420.99 1267.05 153.93 12.14
R104 3 473.31 637.87 1111.18 1284.13 1126.34 157.78 14.00
R105 6 559.6 1060.04 1619.63 1775.61 1633.72 141.88 8.68
R106 4 497.88 655.08 1152.96 1303.2 1173.14 130.05 11.08
R107 4 490.86 485.90 976.76 1229.18 1017.63 211.54 20.78
R108 4 493.29 330.92 825.29 1093.82 850.06 243.75 28.67
R109 5 504.67 709.28 1213.96 1396.23 1240.36 155.86 12.56
R110 4 487.77 624.46 1112.23 1337.44 1154.81 182.62 15.81
R111 5 507.03 907.34 1414.37 1601.84 1459.52 142.31 9.75
R112 3 472.81 448.81 921.69 1127.52 947.05 180.46 19.05
Average 14.33

14
 In fact our addressed routing problem has soft time windows and stochastic travel times, leading to
stochastic arrival times. In what follows we will show how this stochasticity affects the parcel delivery time.
Figures 8, 9 and 10 represent the expected arrival times for the R108 instance by varying the values of
the coefficient of variation. Note that these figures provide in color the comparison of the three customers
sequences that correspond to nodes (11, 19 and 10) for this instance. From these figures, we observe how the
larger the CV the higher is the occurrence of parcel arrives to customer later (or earlier) than expected. That
means the delivery is outside the desired Time Window. For the first deterministic instance, the expected
arrival times for these customers are, 33.54 min, 50.61 min and 70.61 min, respectively.
We compare this deterministic solution with the stochastic one. In figure 8, when the CV = 0.1, the arrival
times range varies between [28min, 40min] for customer 11, [47min, 68min] for customer 19 and [67min,
110min] for customer 10. By increasing the CV to 0.3,in figure 9, these arrival times are in the following
ranges [21min, 110min], [31min, 140min] and [52min, 170min]. In fact higher variability imply larger arrival
time interval, i.e. higher risk of missing the desired delivery time window. Also, figure 10 represents expected
arrival times with CV = 0.6. The same effect is observed when the travel time variability increase the risk of
later (or earlier)parcel delivery increase. For this last case we found [3min, 92min] for customer 11, [20min,
122min] for customer 19 and [47min, 142min] for customer 10.

Figure 8: Expected Arrival Times for the instance R108 Figure 9: Expected Arrival Times for the instance R108
with CV=0.1. with CV=0.3.

Figure 10: Expected Arrival Times for the instance R108 Figure 11: Box-and-whisker Plots of V SSr .
with CV=0.6.

As shown in figure 11, all V SSr values, including plotted outliers, are strictly positive. In more details,
we can note that with a low level of the CV there is no significant difference between the stochastic and
the deterministic solutions. However when CV increases, i.e 30% or 60% we did found a considerably high
VSS average. Which indicates that in order to get more reliable solution it is better to solve the stochastic
version of the problem. We also show herein that, for last-mile parcel delivery with AEVs, solving the
stochastic version of the problem may considerably decrease the risk of missing the desired delivery time
window. For that purpose, we had to resort to the MCS approach to reproduce actual traffic state when
solving the routing problem.

15
6. Conclusion

In this paper, we have proposed to solve the routing problem for last-mile parcel delivery companies
which intend to use Autonomous Electric Vehicles with parcel lockers, for e-commerce industry. Specifically
we consider stochastic travel times instead of deterministic ones. We addressed this more complex version
of the problem by considering realistic travel time probability distribution because the issue of missing the
delivery time window in an e-commerce context is highly challenging. For that purpose, we firstly solve the
deterministic autonomous electric vehicle routing problem with soft time windows using a MILP. This MILP
is formulated with the objective to minimize the total cost that include a penalty cost for earlier or later
parcel delivery. Then we solved the stochastic version of the problem by combining Monte Carlo Simulation
with a Memetic Algorithm.
Extensive experiments based on modified problem instances from the literature are carried out. We
analysed the effect of traffic variability on the parcel arrival time. The results indicate that, under travel
times variability of more than 30%, a reliable routing plan is given when the stochastic rather than the
deterministic version of the model is solved.
Thus, for last-mile delivery companies which intend to switch to this new, highly promising and sus-
tainable transport alternative it is important to capture the actual traffic state when solving the routing
problem. In fact empirical studies on traffic estimation have demonstrated that very often the travel time
variability in urban road exceeds 30%. Then, to achieve the desired benefit and avoid missing the delivery
customer’s specified time window, companies have to invest on optimization tools that integrate daily traffic
forecast. In fact this issue of time discrepancy have been identified in the e-Commerce industry as having a
major negative impact on customer’s delivery experience, and by extension, their loyalty towards the retail
company.

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