Projects

2026

1. PhD

   Developing battery-aware operations for autonomous and unmanned last-mile delivery systems

   Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2026

   Abs

   The economically viable, environmentally efficient, and socially equitable growth potential of e-commerce has drawn a growing number of retailers that compete for the market through increasingly consumer-focused services, particularly just-in-time delivery. However, such consumer-focused services necessitate frequent less-than-truckload last-mile deliveries that endanger sustainability of urban freight. To this end, emerging technologies such as autonomous delivery robots (robots) and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) can help leverage the opportunities and cope with the challenges associated with last-mile distribution. However, unexpected battery drainage leading to failed delivery, loss of control, drone/robot damage, etc., is one of the significant barriers to adoption. Yet, there is a severe dearth of knowledge on real-world implementation of autonomous and unmanned systems for last-mile distribution. Therefore, the objective of this work is to 1) develop empirically validated microscopic energy models for drones and robots to consequently 2) formulate battery-aware drone and robot strategies, and thereby 3) assess sustainability-related opportunities and challenges associated with deploying such battery-aware drones and robots in last-mile distribution. To do so, this work will 1) conduct empirical tests collecting real-time data on drone/robot telemetry, battery state-of-charge, and energy-use, 2) employ analytical procedures modelling efficient payload management plans, speed selection policies, route choice logic, etc. for drones/robots, and 3) assess case studies comparing economic, environmental, and equity-related implications of battery-aware drone/robot-based distribution strategies with conventional delivery methods. In doing so, this work supports large-scale adoption of emerging technologies in urban freight. Specifically, by developing empirically validated microscopic energy models, this work will facilitate energy demand prediction in autonomous and unmanned delivery systems. Further, through battery-aware operational strategies, this work will enable optimal deployment of drones and robots in last-mile distribution with extended autonomy and improved operational reliability. And finally, by comprehensively assessing sustainability of autonomous and unmanned last-mile distribution strategies, this work will equip stakeholders to make informed policies towards sustainable urban freight management. Collectively, these contributions advance Government of India’s commitment towards improvement in logistic performance as outlined in the National Logistics Policy. Nonetheless, beyond logistics, this work also supports use of autonomous and unmanned systems for humanitarian logistics such as in disaster relief, healthcare, and emergency response. These contributions, therefore, underscore the broader societal impact of this work towards reinforcing sustainability and resilience through autonomous and unmanned systems.

2025

1. PhD

   A decision support tool for sustainable urban freight management

   Anmol Pahwa

   Sep 2025

   Abs

   The sustainable growth potential of e-commerce has drawn a growing number of retailers to compete for market through increasingly consumer-focused services. Often such consumer-focused services necessitate frequent less-than-truckload last-mile deliveries. As a consequence, urban freight witnesses a substantial increase in distribution cost as well as transportation-related negative externalities including greenhouse gas emissions advancing climate change, and criteria pollutant emissions affecting health of communities located close to logistics clusters. Hence, consumer-focused services significantly worsen the economic viability, environmental efficiency, and social equity in urban freight. Thus, to leverage the opportunities and cope with the challenges associated with last-mile deliveries, e-retailers establish alternate last-mile distribution strategies. Unlike the conventional strategy that includes use of diesel vehicles for home deliveries, these alternate strategies could include use of electric delivery vehicles for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced delivery vehicles for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, collection-points for customer pickup, or even drones and robots for autonomous operations. Thus, the objective of this work is to develop a decision support tool to facilitate sustainable strategic decision-making for e-retailers, enabling them to implement alternate last-mile distribution strategies that are economically viable, environment efficient, and socially equitable. In doing so, this tool will enable informed decision-making for the e-retailers in the Indian retail sector to implement context-specific sustainable solutions.

2. BTech

   Exploring Anthropological, Meteorological, and Temporal Determinants of Air Quality

   Om Ramawtar Yadav , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   Coming soon...

3. BTech

   Simulating Daily Urban Mobility in India: A Markov Chain Approach using Time Use Survey Data

   Arvind Vidhyashankar , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   Travel is an induced demand, characterised by individual’s economic and lifestyle choices. As these travel patterns evolve, urban and transportation planning must adapt to meet these changes. Understanding and forecasting travel demand is crucial for effective infrastructure development and policy planning, ensuring that transportation systems align with the needs of the population. Thus, to identify typical travel demand patterns, this study will develop an activity-based model and simulate a day in the life of Indians. In particular, the authors will utilise the 2019 Indian Time Use Survey to model an individual’s daily activity plan as a Markov Process and consequently simulate transitions between daily activities such as work, education, leisure, domestic chores, etc., across different times of the day, while also accounting for individual, communal, and regional factors. In doing so, this study will inform stakeholders for better urban and transportation planning tailored to unique demographic and economic landscapes of different Indian cities.

4. MTech

   Simulating a day in the life of Indians: Unravelling the travel patterns

   Aditya Aggarwal , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   Travel is an induced demand, characterised by individual’s economic and lifestyle choices. As these travel patterns evolve, urban and transportation planning must adapt to meet these changes. Understanding and forecasting travel demand is crucial for effective infrastructure development and policy planning, ensuring that transportation systems align with the needs of the population. Thus, to identify typical travel demand patterns, this study will develop an activity-based model and simulate a day in the life of Indians. In particular, the authors will utilise the 2019 Indian Time Use Survey to model an individual’s daily activity plan as a Markov Process and consequently simulate transitions between daily activities such as work, education, leisure, domestic chores, etc., across different times of the day, while also accounting for individual, communal, and regional factors. In doing so, this study will inform stakeholders for better urban and transportation planning tailored to unique demographic and economic landscapes of different Indian cities.

5. MTech

   modular Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (mALNS) for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)

   Harshvardhan Ket , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   As urban environments grow increasingly complex, the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) continues to challenge researchers and practitioners. A typical VRP aims to configure routes for a fleet of vehicles serving a set of customers, rendering minimum operational costs. To address this computational challenge, Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) has emerged as an effective tool, leveraging its flexible paradigm of iterative destroy and rebuild. Specifically, the ALNS metaheuristic searches through the neighborhood by iteratively destroying and consequently rebuilding the solution thereby reconfiguring large portions of the solution using specific operators that are chosen adaptively in each iteration of the algorithm based on the performance of operators in the previous iterations, hence the name adaptive large neighborhood search. However, this flexibility introduces complexities in ALNS development and deployment stemming from operator selection and heuristic organization. To this end, this work introduces a modular ALNS (mALNS) framework to efficiently solve the different variants of the VRP. Unlike traditional ALNS implementations, mALNS emphasizes modular architecture, allowing seamless integration of destroy and repair operators, acceptance criteria, and adaptive mechanisms. Specifically, the ALNS implementation in this work breaks down operator and heuristic mechanisms into individual modular pieces, that are combined adaptively in each iteration of the algorithm based on the performance of the modules in the previous iterations. This modularity enhances scalability and adaptability, enabling tailored solutions for complex real-world routing problems that include resource-related constraints, customer-specific time-windows, multi-echelon distribution structures, as well as dynamic and stochastic elements from the delivery environment.

6. PhD

   Eco-driving freight on Indian highways: Assessing opportunities and challenges towards reducing transportation-related externalities

   Stephen Babu , Anmol Pahwa, and Atriya Biswas

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   While freight is crucial for continued economic development, the trucks that haul this cargo consume substantial amounts of fuel – increasing India’s dependence on oil imports, as well as significantly contribute towards greenhouse gas emissions – advancing global climate change, and criteria pollutant emissions – affecting local community health. To this end, alternate fuel technologies – such as battery electric, plug-in hybrid, hydrogen fuel cell, solar-power, etc. – can help mitigate these transportation-related externalities. However, the adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in the long-haul freight sector has been sluggish, primarily due to the technological nascency, insufficient infrastructure, and lengthy breakeven periods associated with these technologies. Thus, a significant change in the operator’s fleet can take a considerable amount of time, while there is an urgent need for operational improvement initiatives that could provide efficient alternatives to address crude oil dependence, global climate change, and local pollution impacts of freight. Hence, the objective of this work is to explore opportunities and challenges associated with eco-driving freight on Indian highways for reducing transportation-related externalities. To comprehensively explore the potential for reduction in transportation-related externalities from eco-driving freight on Indian highways, this study will develop microscopic vehicle fuel consumption and tailpipe emissions in the first phase of this work, and then study long-term sustainability of truck eco-driving in the second phase. In doing so, this research aims to equip logistics operators with the tools to effectively manage long-haul freight and provide government agencies with insights for informed policy and decision-making. In addition, this study aims to support strategic planning of the transportation sector consistent with Government of India’s a) ambition to improve the ease of doing business by reducing logistics costs to 10% of the GDP, as targeted by the National Logistics Policy, b) commitment at The Paris Agreement towards reducing emission intensity of its GDP by 34% by 2030 relative to 2005, and c) objective to reduce traffic accident-related fatalities with engineering solutions particularly focusing on heavy commercial vehicles consistent with Vision Zero target for 2030 and beyond.

7. PhD

   Assessing sustainability of last-mile distribution strategies for e-commerce deliveries across different Indian cities

   Blessy K , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2025

   Abs

   The surge in internet access in the past decade has paved the way for retailers to expand their market horizon with e-commerce platforms. This rise of e-commerce has bridged the gap between the consumer and the retailer, thus improving economic viability in urban freight – first pillar of sustainability. Further, e-commerce has enabled demand consolidation and delivery route optimization, thereby enhancing environmental efficiency in urban freight – second pillar of sustainability. Moreover, e-commerce has facilitated access to vital products for otherwise disadvantaged communities, thus advancing social equity in urban freight – third pillar of sustainability. This sustainable growth potential of e-commerce has drawn a growing number of retailers to compete for market through increasingly consumer-focused services. Often such consumer-focused services necessitate frequent less-than-truckload last-mile deliveries. As a consequence, urban freight witnesses a substantial increase in distribution cost as well as transportation-related negative externalities including greenhouse gas emissions advancing climate change, and criteria pollutant emissions affecting health of communities located close to logistics clusters. Hence, consumer-focused services significantly worsen the economic viability, environmental efficiency, and social equity in urban freight. Thus, to leverage the opportunities and cope with the challenges associated with last-mile deliveries, e-retailers establish alternate last-mile distribution strategies. Unlike the conventional strategy that includes use of diesel vehicles for home deliveries, these alternate strategies could include use of electric delivery vehicles for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced delivery vehicles for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, collection-points for customer pickup, or even drones and robots for autonomous operations. Thus, the objective of this study is to assess sustainability of different last-mile distribution strategies across different Indian cities. To model the diverse distribution environments, this work will employ a machine learning-enhanced continuous approximation-based framework (to be developed by the team). With this framework, the authors will assess a) economic viability by evaluating the total cost of distribution stemming from fixed assets and associated operations; b) environmental efficiency by estimating the distribution-related emissions; and c) social equity by establishing the social cost of these emissions, for each of the different distribution strategies.

2024

1. MTech

   Construction Consolidation Centres for Urban Construction Logistics

   Krishnapriya Mohanan , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2024

   Abs

   The Indian construction industry faces significant material supply chain challenges due to its highly fragmented and decentralized delivery model, resulting in a high number of daily deliveries, coordination inefficiencies, traffic congestion, limited onsite storage, etc., while construction consolidation centres have demonstrated remarkable success in streamlining logistics and improving supply chain performances in developed countries, their applicability and potential adoption remain underexplored within India’s rapidly growing construction industry. This study investigates the fundamental research question of exploring the applicability of the “Construction Consolidation Centres (CCC)” in India, by assessing its alignment with Indian Construction supply chain challenges, industry support and operational feasibility. It includes identifying material categories and regions, along with a case study application that compares the logistic costs of the existing direct delivery model to the CCC model to provide strategic recommendations for its implementation. The study follows a two-phase mixed-methods approach, where Phase 1 includes a questionnaire survey analysis using descriptive and inferential statistics to understand the industry alignment and perspective, Phase 2 explores CCC implementation through a case study application and uses vehicle routing optimization to do a comparative cost analysis between the traditional direct delivery model and the CCC model, using purchase order data. The findings confirm the potential applicability of CCC in India and recommend its role as a control tower and a consolidation hub. As a first step, this study lays the foundation for future research in implementing CCC in India, and offers a potential solution to construction firms, policy makers and logistic providers seeking innovative solutions to achieve a more resilient construction supply chain.

2. MTech

   Assessing sustainability of last-mile distribution strategies for e-commerce deliveries in Chennai

   Varun A , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jun 2024

   Abs

   The surge in internet access in the past decade has paved the way for retailers to expand their market horizon with e-commerce platforms. This rise of e-commerce has bridged the gap between the consumer and the retailer, thus improving economic viability in urban freight – first pillar of sustainability. Further, e-commerce has enabled demand consolidation and delivery route optimization, thereby enhancing environmental efficiency in urban freight – second pillar of sustainability. Moreover, e-commerce has facilitated access to vital products for otherwise disadvantaged communities, thus advancing social equity in urban freight – third pillar of sustainability. This sustainable growth potential of e-commerce has drawn a growing number of retailers to compete for market through increasingly consumer-focused services. Often such consumer-focused services necessitate frequent less-than-truckload last-mile deliveries. As a consequence, urban freight witnesses a substantial increase in distribution cost as well as transportation-related negative externalities including greenhouse gas emissions advancing climate change, and criteria pollutant emissions affecting health of communities located close to logistics clusters. Hence, consumer-focused services significantly worsen the economic viability, environmental efficiency, and social equity in urban freight. Thus, to leverage the opportunities and cope with the challenges associated with last-mile deliveries, e-retailers establish alternate last-mile distribution strategies. Unlike the conventional strategy that includes use of diesel vehicles for home deliveries, these alternate strategies could include use of electric delivery vehicles for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced delivery vehicles for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, collection-points for customer pickup, or even drones and robots for autonomous operations. Thus, the objective of this study is to assess sustainability of different last-mile distribution strategies for an e-retailer offering delivery service in Chennai. With a Continuous Approximation (CA) based last-mile distribution model developed previously, this work will assess a) economic viability by evaluating the total cost of distribution stemming from fixed assets and associated operations; b) environmental efficiency by estimating the distribution-related emissions; and c) social equity by establishing the social cost of these emissions, for each of the different distribution strategies.In particular, this study will a) estimate the efficacy of conventional distribution strategy; b) confirm the competitiveness of electric delivery vehicles; c) evaluate the effectiveness of crowdsourced delivery services; d) advance the case for consolidation-based multi-echelon distribution strategies; e) establish the rationale for customer pickups; and f) develop the use case for drones and robots, thereby enabling informed decision-making for the e-retailer.

3. PhD

   A Holistic Continuous Approximation Framework for Strategic Last-Mile Distribution Planning

   Blessy Kirubakaran , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2024

   Abs

   The conventional approach to modelling last-mile distribution operations involves use of the discrete formulation method which renders a representative mathematical model necessitating use of sophisticated solution techniques. While such an intensive approach is justified when decision-makers require a precise plan to support operational planning, this level of precision is redundant for strategic planning, wherein available information is representative but not necessarily exact. To this end, continuous approximation (CA) method offers a practical alternative with use of continuous density functions that estimate parameters approximately, thus striking a balance between estimation accuracy and computational effort. However, typical CA-based routing frameworks assume a simplified distribution environment that significantly limits the capability of such frameworks to accurately model last-mile operations in real-world distribution environments, such as postal service, e-commerce, q-commerce, waste collection, emergency service etc. Thus, the objective of this work is to develop a holistic CA framework for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) to facilitate strategic last-mile distribution planning within diverse logistic settings. Specifically, this study synthesises a range of distribution environments, each with peculiar distribution structure and distinctive customer characteristics. Subsequently, it optimizes last-mile distribution for distribution environment instance using an Adaptive Large Neighbourhood Search (ALNS) metaheuristic. Finally, this work develops a robust CA-based functional form through Symbolic Regression to precisely estimate the total distribution tour length across the various distribution environments. In doing so, this work supports strategic decision-making for a wide scope of logistic operators that may have representative but not necessarily exact information.

4. PhD

   Exploring determinants of consumer shopping behaviour in India

   Blessy Kirubakaran , and Anmol Pahwa

   Jul 2024

   Abs

   The retail sector, conventionally dominated by physical marketplaces with brick-and-mortar stores (organised) and itinerant merchants (unorganised), has witnessed an increasing presence of digital marketplaces in the past few years. The ease of shopping afforded by this surge in e-commerce has significantly reshaped individuals’ shopping behaviours and consequently, urban goods flow. What would previously be a trip to the bazaar is now a delivery to the home. This shift in urban goods flow from aggregate commercial to disaggregate residential locations raises concerns pertaining to sustainability of freight operations. Thus, the objective of this study is to understand the changing patterns of urban goods flow in Indian cities by exploring determinants of consumer shopping behaviour. In particular, using the 2019 Indian Time Use Survey, this work will develop a multinomial logit model to identify individual, communal, and regional factors that influence consumers’ choice of shopping channel. In doing so, this study empowers stakeholders with comprehensive consumer demand characteristics to develop targeted interventions that optimize freight operations and enhance sustainability of urban goods flow.