Smart locker banks are collections of communal mail boxes (lockers) where consumers can collect parcels by digitally interacting with it. In recent years, smart locker banks have been emerging around the world, implemented by local and global postal services. Smart locker banks take advantage of consolidation opportunities, necessitating less resources to deliver the same amount of parcels. We develop an optimization based method to design a smart locker bank.
Smart locker networks are a last mile delivery alternative supporting the growth of online retailing while ensuring a level of security for unattended deliveries. A deliverer servicing Inpost’s smart locker network can deliver 600 parcels traveling 70km in a day.
The model is based on a set of probabilistic scenarios, each of them composed of a certain number of requests for a locker of a specific volume, or bigger. The vertical dimension is limited by ergonomic constraints, since people must be able to access the highest lockers. The horizontal dimension can be more flexible, and depends for example on the space available at the considered location. For each scenario, demand satisfaction generates revenues accordingly to the dimensions of the request, and given ergonomic cost.
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