  Last-mile logistics is regarded as an essential yet highly expensive
component of parcel logistics. In dense urban environments, this is partially
caused by inherent inefficiencies due to traffic congestion and the disparity
and accessibility of customer locations. In parcel logistics, access hubs are
facilities supporting relay-based last-mile activities by offering temporary
storage locations enabling the decoupling of last-mile activities from the rest
of the urban distribution chain. This paper focuses on a novel tactical
problem: the geographically dynamic deployment of pooled relocatable storage
capacity modules in an urban parcel network operating under space-time
uncertainty. In particular, it proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization
model for the access hub dynamic pooled capacity deployment problem with
synchronization of underlying operations through travel time estimates, and a
solution approach based on a rolling horizon algorithm with lookahead and a
benders decomposition able to solve large scale instances of a real-sized
megacity. Numerical results, inspired by the case of a large parcel express
carrier, are provided to evaluate the computational performance of the proposed
approach and suggest up to 28% last-mile cost savings and 26% capacity savings
compared to a static capacity deployment strategy.
