Parcel Delivery by Collaborative Use of Truck Fleets and Bus-Transit Vehicles

City express delivery demand is characterized by large quantities, small parcel sizes, dense batch frequency, and timeliness. To meet demand and control costs and CO2 emissions from parcel delivery, a collaborative delivery mode using bus vehicles and a truck fleet is proposed. A model is built to optimize delivery schemes based on a bus–road mixed network and thus minimize the fixed cost, the delivery cost, the compensation cost for the emitted CO2, and the unpunctuality penalty cost. An ant-colony algorithm is designed to solve the model. Delivery schemes for the 97 demand sites in a Chinese city are calculated under collaborative mode and truck-only mode. The advantages of a collaborative mode are verified by comparing the two types of delivery schemes.