The use of autonomous coupling capable trailer to reduce the cost per delivery and increase profit for logistic companies: a simulative analysis

Last-mile distribution causes more obstacles in urban areas all over the world. Increased volumes of packages to be delivered for customer homes is directly increasing the number of delivery vans movement inside the urban areas and thus add to congestion and negative health impact. Therefore, it is anything but surprising that in recent years many traditional 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. In this paper we introduce the autonomous latching and unlatching concept for urban vehicle with trailer. Considering the fact that latching and unlatching operations generally happen in unstructured environments where obstacles are left lying around, the whole latching and unlatching process is divided into two phases, namely the trailer repositioning phase and the autonomous latching and unlatching phase. The benefits in last-mile logistics of using this autonomous trailer for unattended deliveries are evaluated in simulation with Anylogic software. Four different scenarios are simulated and compared: traditional vans without trailers; traditional vans to which trailers can be added manually; traditional vans with autonomous coupling capable trailers; autonomous vans with autonomous coupling capable trailers.