A Cuckoo Search Heuristic to Improve a Last Mile Ecommerce Problem

The rise of e-commerce as an alternative to face-to-face trader has entailed an increase in logistic complexity of the deliveries to end customers. It is in these deliveries that there are too many incidences due to the recipients not being in the agreed place. This work presents a new framework of last mile logistics where customers can suggest several delivery points with different time-windows. This logistics problem is a new kind of vehicle routing problem with time-windows, but more complex. A cuckoo search heuristic has been proposed to solve it. The results reveal that this new policy with several locations can reduce delivery costs. Regarding cuckoo search, this algorithm finds good solutions, as long as the execution time is not a limitation.