Two-tier city logistics systems are playing a very important role nowadays in the management of urban freight activities. Although several city authorities have promoted different measures to foster the implementation of small urban consolidation centers in a two-tier system, only a few authors have addressed the joint problem of operating these facilities and providing services to customers. We show how the problem can be modeled as a new variant of the bin packing, for which we provide a mixed integer programming formulation and two heuristics that are shown to be quite effective in solving efficiently and to near optimality the problem. The application of our approach on real data from the city of Turin puts into highlight the superiority of the consolidation approach, including the bundle of goods from different providers, stockholding and other value-added logistics services, over the classical single-tier approach. In addition, the paper provides a thorough analysis of some emerging aspects of the on-demand economy, as the consideration of customers’ preferences and the integration of multiple delivery options. The managerial insights coming from this work will be part of the new Logistics and Mobility Plan to be activated in 2022 in the Piedmont region.

如今，两层城市物流系统在城市货运活动的管理中起着非常重要的作用。尽管一些城市当局采取了不同的措施来促进两层系统中小型城市整合中心的实施，但只有少数作者解决了运营这些设施和为客户提供服务的共同问题。我们展示了如何将问题建模为bin打包的新变体，为此，我们提供了混合整数规划公式和两种启发式方法，它们被证明在有效解决问题和接近最优方面非常有效。我们的方法在都灵市真实数据上的应用突显了整合方法的优势，包括来自不同提供商的商品捆绑，传统的单层方法进行库存和其他增值物流服务。此外，本文还对按需经济的一些新兴方面进行了全面分析，其中考虑了客户的偏好以及多种交付方式的集成。这项工作带来的管理见解将成为新的物流与出行计划的一部分，该计划将于2022年在皮埃蒙特地区启动。