Due to the complexity of urban area, the city vehicle routing problem has been a difficult problem. The problem has involved factors such as parking availability, road conditions, and traffic congestion, all of which increase transportation costs and delivery times. To resolve this problem, one effective solution can be the use of parcel lockers located near customer sites, where products are stored for customers to pick up. When a vehicle delivers products to a designated parcel locker, customers in the vicinity must pick up their products from that locker. Recently, identifying optimal locations for these parcel lockers has become an important research issue. This paper addresses the parcel locker location problem within the context of urban traffic congestion. By considering dynamic environmental factors, we propose a Markov decision process model to tackle the city vehicle routing problem. To ensure more real situations, we have used optimal paths for distances between two nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the viability of our model and solution strategy.

In supply chain, most partners except the top level suppliers have inbound and outbound logistics. For example, toll manufacturing companies get unprocessed materials from a requesting company and send the processed materials back to the company after toll processing. Accordingly, those companies have inbound and outbound transportation costs in their total logistics costs. For many cases, the company may make the schedule of distributions by considering only the due delivery dates. However, the inbound and outbound transportation costs could significantly affect the total logistics costs. Thus, this paper considers the inbound and outbound transportation costs to find the optimal distribution plans. In addition, we have considered the inventory holding costs as well with transportation costs. From the experimental results, we have provided the optimal strategies for the distributions of replenishment as well as deliveries.