Multi-objective Route Planning for Urban Last-mile Delivery Considering Packaging Damage Exposure

CHANG Chunyuan; LI Liming

doi:10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.026

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Packaging Engineering ›› 2026, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (15) : 254-262. DOI: 10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.026

Green Packaging and Circular Economy

Multi-objective Route Planning for Urban Last-mile Delivery Considering Packaging Damage Exposure

CHANG Chunyuan¹, LI Liming^2,*

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Abstract

The work aims to investigate the optimization effect of incorporating packaging damage exposure into routing decision-making, to address the insufficient consideration of packaging safety in urban last-mile delivery routing. Within the framework of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), a three-objective optimization model was developed by integrating packaging fragility coefficient, vehicle load condition, and normalized cumulative transportation distance, with the objectives of minimizing delivery cost, delay penalty, and packaging damage exposure. The model was solved using the NSGA-II algorithm and evaluated on Solomon benchmark instances from four aspects: model comparison, customer-scale extension, algorithm comparison, and parameter sensitivity analysis. Compared with the model that did not consider the packaging damage exposure objective, the proposed model reduced packaging damage exposure by 6.42%-14.18% in representative 25-customer solutions. When the customer scale was extended to 50 and 100 customers, packaging damage exposure still showed a decreasing trend, with reductions of 6.34%-23.37%. In terms of cost and timeliness, delivery cost mainly decreased, while the main trade-off was increased delay. Algorithm comparison showed that NSGA-II could obtain competitive compromise solutions across all tested instances. Sensitivity analysis indicated that the proportion of high-fragility customers and the loading sensitivity parameter affected packaging damage exposure, whereas timeliness responses exhibited clear scenario differences. Explicitly incorporating packaging damage exposure into last-mile delivery routing optimization can effectively improve packaging safety performance in the tested instances and reveal the trade-off between packaging safety and delivery timeliness under varying delivery conditions, providing a methodological reference for packaging-logistics collaborative optimization in fragile goods distribution.

Key words

urban last-mile delivery / packaging damage exposure / multi-objective optimization / vehicle routing problem / NSGA-II

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CHANG Chunyuan, LI Liming. Multi-objective Route Planning for Urban Last-mile Delivery Considering Packaging Damage Exposure[J]. Packaging Engineering. 2026, 47(15): 254-262 https://doi.org/10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.026

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