Prioritizing Risks in Last Mile Delivery: A Bayesian Belief Network Approach

The remarkable explosion of e-commerce has marked the latest years of different industries and put forward a higher requirement for the last mile delivery. The last mile delivery is one of the most complex, costly, and inefficient processes along the entire logistics fulfillment chain in an e-commerce context. Its corresponding risks are major contributors to delivery failure. This work proposes a comprehensive framework on risk identification and analysis in the last mile delivery to support delivery planning. Risks were deduced from available literature, and others were induced through semi-structured interviews with experts in the field. Risks are categorized and the relative probability and severity of individual risks are determined. This study adopts a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model to identify the interdependency among risks and rank them, as the conventional ranking methods fail to take interdependency into account. The results indicate that privacy concerns, IT, and natural disasters are the most critical risks. This study will aid logistics service providers to ultimately deciding the solutions of last mile delivery that need to be utilized by prioritizing last mile delivery possible risks to increase their competitiveness and market share and minimize delivery costs.