Kyungsoo Jeong | National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

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Presentation Description

Over the last two decades, online shopping has seen exponential growth globally. This has led to a surge in parcel delivery demand, consequently amplifying the environmental and social expenses related to e-commerce deliveries. Faced with competition and increasing demand, online retailers have improved their service standards by providing diverse delivery options, such as free shipping/return, time-varying delivery options, and pick-up services. Additionally, to accelerate the decarbonization of logistics and enhance delivery efficiency, novel delivery vehicles such as electric trucks/vans/bikes, drones, and delivery robots have emerged in the past few years. However, the adoption of these evolving delivery methods may lead to inconsistencies in the quality of online shopping experiences from the consumer's (aka receiver’s) perspective. Past research endeavors have primarily focused on developing models aimed at estimating the demand for home deliveries, exploring the shopping behaviors of different demographic segments, or examining freight accessibility from shipper’s or carrier’s perspective. Most of freight accessibility studies have not considered the impact of new delivery mode features (e.g., energy intensity, delivery costs, etc.). This study fills this gap by developing a novel quantitative approach to evaluating a location’s propensity to receive goods via e-commerce. A metric is developed to measure how efficiently online shopping customers in a location can receive their goods through delivery options and applicable delivery vehicles for each delivery option. The methodology is implemented for the San Francisco Bay area as a case study. The approach proposed in our study can provide valuable insights into where people have limited benefits from online shopping and how emerging vehicles can change the quality of the online shopping delivery experience within the study region. Results demonstrate the potential for integrating a freight efficiency and productivity measure into urban freight planning, offering robust quantitative evaluation methods to improve logistics practices and foster energy-efficient mobility systems.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Kyungsoo Jeong joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 2018 as a researcher at the Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. His areas of interest include freight demand modeling and analysis, freight data collection approaches, and transportation system optimization. At NREL, he has currently served as a freight transportation modeling lead, aiming to understand freight and urban logistics systems and resolve their problems through advanced data collection/mining and innovative modeling approaches. Prior to joining NREL, he was a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab. He studied how new mobility services and emerging technologies affect people and goods movements and how such technologies can increase the transportation system's efficiency.

Co-presenters

Yuetong  Wang
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

Venu Garikapati
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

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