Vans, cargo bikes, or even autonomous delivery vehicles are used in urban parcel delivery. A fleet consisting of these vehicles is called heterogeneous, differing in several technological dimensions including speed, range, as well as the impact on the delivery process. This research analyzes the operations of such a heterogeneous fleet in express urban parcel delivery. The heterogeneous vehicles are assigned to serve dynamically requesting customers within a delivery promise. We propose and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of selected policies assigning heterogeneous vehicles to serve customer requests in delivery districts with differing characteristics.

Heavy-duty battery electric commercial vehicles may be limited to short routes without a secondary power source. Therefore, concepts for commercial vehicles with fuel cell range extenders have been proposed. This paper presents an agent-based supply chain GIS model developed to simulate urban and regional freight distribution employing fleets of electric trucks equipped with fuel cell range extenders. The model was implemented in AnyLogic to simulate the transport of goods from regional distributors to urban stores. It solves a vehicle routing problem and identifies optimised routes by running a simulated annealing algorithm complemented by several heuristic methods. This model was used to optimise vehicle concepts for a particular freight distribution task. A reduction in battery capacity minimised costs directly related to the vehicles, whereas an increase in both battery and load capacity minimised fleet size. Additional power generation in the range extenders compensated for the reduction of battery capacity.

Resilience of critical infrastructure such as road networks is crucial to maintain provision of essential logistics services even and especially during disruptive events. This paper proposes a new method for assessing the resilience of urban road networks using shortest path analysis. The method is based on representative routes which connect selected Points of Interest with service providers. By comparing reachability and shortest path lengths for these routes in an intact road network with those in a compromised network, weakly connected areas are detected and the overall network resilience against the respective disruption analysed. To that end, the paper proposes the Robustness of Accessibil- ity index as a novel score for the resilience of critical infrastructure. To demonstrate the proposed method, a case study of flooding in Trier, Germany, provides insights into the vulnerability of the city’s road network in terms of potential response delays in emergency logistics. Such an analysis can help policymakers and planners improve the robustness and reliability of critical infrastructure and logistics processes.