Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 621

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 126 of the 126 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective

Open access
Boysen, Nils, Fedtke, Stefan, Schwerdfeger, Stefan·2021·OR Spectrum

Abstract

In the wake of e-commerce and its successful diffusion in most commercial activities, last-mile distribution causes more and more trouble in urban areas all around the globe. Growing parcel volumes to be delivered toward customer homes increase the number of delivery vans entering the city centers and thus add to congestion, pollution, and negative health impact. Therefore, it is anything but surprising that in recent years many novel delivery concepts on the last mile have been innovated. Among the most prominent are unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and autonomous delivery robots taking over parcel delivery. This paper surveys established and novel last-mile concepts and puts special emphasis on the decision problems to be solved when setting up and operating each concept. To do so, we systematically record the alternative delivery concepts in a compact notation scheme, discuss the most important decision problems, and survey existing research on operations research methods solving these problems. Furthermore, we elaborate promising future research avenues.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s00291-020-00607-8

Cites

126 of 126 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 126 references

Cited by

See all 621

Metadata

Authors
Boysen, N., Fedtke, S., & Schwerdfeger, S.
Venue
OR Spectrum
Published
2020-09-21
Volume
43
Issue
1
Pages
1-58
ISSN
  • 0171-6468 (ISSN-L)
  • 1436-6304
OpenAlex
W3087935424
Cited by
621
References
126
FWCI
28.77
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1007/s00291-020-00607-8
The paper
Boysen, N., Fedtke, S., & Schwerdfeger, S. (2021). Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective. OR Spectrum. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00291-020-00607-8

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.