Increasing congestion and environmental pressures in urban logistics, alongside growing population demands, necessitate innovative solutions. This thesis tackles synchronized two-echelon routing problems within multimodal logistics, specifically exploring the potential of integrating waterborne transport. By developing optimization models and solution approaches for the comprehensive design and management of these systems—encompassing strategic location, tactical allocation, and operational routing and synchronization—the results promote a transition toward more sustainable and efficient urban logistics, ultimately fostering healthier, more livable, and economically vibrant cities.

This study focuses on two-echelon synchronized logistics problems in the context of integrated water- and land-based transportation (IWLT) systems. The aim is to meet the increasing demand in city logistics as a result of the growth in transport activities, including parcel delivery, food delivery, and waste collection. We propose two models, a novel mixed integer linear joint model, and a logic-based Benders’ decomposition (LBBD) model, for a two-echelon problem under realistic settings such as multi-trips, time windows, and synchronization at the satellites with no storage and limited resource capacities. The objective is to optimize transfers and satellite assignments, thereby reducing overall logistics costs for street vehicles and vessels. Computational experiments demonstrate that the LBBD model is more robust in terms of solution quality and solution time on average while the added value of the LBBD is more evident when solving large-scale instances with 100 customers, reducing the overall costs by 10.6% on average and significantly reducing the fleet costs on both networks. Furthermore, we assess the effect of changing cost parameters and satellite locations in the proposed IWLT system–analyzing system behavior and suggesting potential improvements–and evaluate several system alternatives in city logistics–consisting of different transportation network designs (single- and two-echelon), vehicle types, and operational constraints. On average, the proposed two-echelon IWLT system reduces the number of kilometers traveled by vehicles at street level by ranging from 20% to 30% compared to a typical single-echelon service design that relies solely on trucks.

This study considers an integrated water- and land-based transportation (IWLT) system for waste collection. Research on the issue is motivated by increased heavy street movements that damage quay walls as well as congestion. We present a novel two-echelon vehicle routing problem with satellite synchronization based on a two-index formulation and evaluate it on small-sized instances for 10 waste points and 4 hubs. We compare the proposed synchronized IWLT approach with three benchmarks that can reduce issues associated with heavy loads. It is shown that the proposed system can provide better solutions with less collection cost, reduced street movements and lightweight garbage vehicles.