Attended Home Delivery: reducing last-mile environmental impact by changing customer habits

Abstract Frequently, e-commerce customers pay additional costs for home delivery taking place in a restricted time window. We show how such a behavior is counterproductive in terms of last-mile routing operations. We consider two typical retailer policies to organize the service (a fast delivery in a restricted time interval or the presence of different time windows for each customer) and model them as optimization problems that minimize traveled distance as main cost source for the retailer. For both problems, we convert the obtained number of kilometers into gas emissions under different scenarios characterized by different time windows width. Results are extremely interesting, indicating more sustainable e-commerce customer-oriented strategies.