LogNiti Lab

Transitioning India’s logistics sector towards a

sustainable industry with economically viable, environment efficient, and socially equitable freight transportation capable of handling high-probability low-severity fluctuations
resilient industry that is robust, redundant, resourceful, and rapid against low-probability high-severity disruptions

LogNiti lab invites students, research scholars, and industry professionals to work towards our common mission. Get in touch!

News

Nov 19, 2025	New project - Developing battery-aware operations for autonomous and unmanned last-mile delivery systems
Nov 17, 2025	New project - Eco-driving freight on Indian highways: Assessing opportunities and challenges towards reducing transportation-related externalities
Nov 15, 2024	New Course - Optimisation Techniques in Transportation Engineering

Latest posts

May 15, 2024	Monitoring Daily Air Quality
Oct 16, 2022	Towards last-mile delivery with electric vehicles
Aug 04, 2022	Eco-routing trucks to reduce externalities

Selected publications

White Paper

Coping with the Rise of E-commerce Generated Home Deliveries through Innovative Last-mile Technologies and Strategies

Miguel Jaller , and Anmol Pahwa

National Center for Sustainable Trasnsportation

Abs URL

E-commerce can potentially make urban goods flow economically viable, environmentally efficient, and socially equitable. However, as e-retailers compete with increasingly consumer-focused services, urban freight witnesses a significant increase in associated distribution costs and negative externalities, particularly affecting those living close to logistics clusters. Hence, to remain competitive, e-retailers deploy alternate last-mile distribution strategies. These alternate strategies, such as those that include the use of electric delivery trucks for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced drivers for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, or collection-points for customer pickup, can restore sustainable urban goods flow. Thus, in this study, the authors investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with alternate last-mile distribution strategies for an e-retailer offering expedited service with rush delivery within strict timeframes. To this end, the authors formulate a last-mile network design (LMND) problem as a dynamic-stochastic two-echelon capacitated location routing problem with time-windows (DS-2E-C-LRP-TW) addressed with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic.