Two-Echelon Delivery Vehicle Sharing and Repositioning in Hyperconnected Urban Logistic Networks

In response to the growing demand for sustainable and efficient urban deliveries, this study introduces a two-echelon vehicle sharing and repositioning problem for containerized delivery operations within a hyperconnected urban logistics system. We leverage a Physical Internet (PI)-enabled three-tier logistic hub network, comprising gateway, local, and access hubs, to facilitate efficient flows. By adopting containerized delivery, vehicles can rapidly swap standardized modular containers at hubs to reduce handling time. Moreover, inspired by the PI concept of open resource sharing, we determine optimal service routes within a two-echelon structure that jointly utilizes heterogeneous vehicle fleets and enables dynamic vehicle relocation across hubs. We formulate this problem as a multi-period integer program that integrates path-based service vehicle planning with arc-based container routing. To address real-world large-scale instances, we propose a decomposition-based heuristic with capacity-aware flow assignment, which partitions the problem into subproblems structured by echelons and regions. A case study on the Atlanta metropolitan area demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model and solution approach. Experimental results show that the two-echelon hyperconnected delivery system reduces CO2-eq emissions by 45.0% and total costs by 16.8% at full market share compared to a traditional single-echelon alternative, while enabling vehicle repositioning further lowers costs by up to 17.7%.