Papers on “last-mile delivery”
Research on “last-mile delivery” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers. Also as Markdown.
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Key findings#
- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “last-mile delivery” appeared in 752 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in operations research (595), AI (52) and economics (48).
- 130 of them were published in 2025, against 22 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Hong Kong Polytechnic University (22), Eindhoven University of Technology (10) and Nanyang Technological University (10).
- The journals publishing most of them were Transportation Research Part E Logistics and Transportation Review (91), Computers & Industrial Engineering (51) and Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies (39).
- The most-cited of them is “Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective” (OR Spectrum, 2020), with 631 citations.
Papers per year#
20172026 (so far)
| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operations Research | 16 | 13 | 28 | 36 | 57 | 58 | 82 | 76 | 108 | 121 |
| AI | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 10 | 12 | 7 | 8 |
| Economics | 4 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 9 | 12 | 7 |
| Marketing | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 6 |
| Information Systems | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 7 |
| Management | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Finance | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Statistics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| All categories | 22 | 15 | 39 | 39 | 75 | 68 | 104 | 107 | 130 | 153 |
Where the papers come from#
| # | Institution | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | 22 |
| 2 | Eindhoven University of Technology | 10 |
| 3 | Nanyang Technological University | 10 |
| 4 | Tongji University | 10 |
| 5 | Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les réseaux d'entreprise, la logistique et le transport | 9 |
| 6 | Delft University of Technology | 9 |
| 7 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 9 |
| 8 | Southwest Jiaotong University | 8 |
| 9 | The University of Melbourne | 8 |
| 10 | Chung-Ang University | 7 |
| # | Country | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 132 |
| 2 | United States | 87 |
| 3 | Italy | 36 |
| 4 | Netherlands | 35 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 34 |
| 6 | Canada | 28 |
| 7 | Germany | 28 |
| 8 | France | 28 |
| 9 | Hong Kong | 27 |
| 10 | Australia | 25 |
| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | vehicle routing | 69 |
| 2 | drone delivery | 66 |
| 3 | mixed-integer linear programming | 54 |
| 4 | time windows | 53 |
| 5 | urban logistics | 51 |
| 6 | adaptive large neighborhood search | 47 |
| 7 | e-commerce logistics | 40 |
| 8 | parcel lockers | 33 |
| 9 | package delivery | 30 |
Most-cited papers#
| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 631 | 8.6 | Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective | OR Spectrum | 2020-09-21 | Nils Boysen, Stefan Fedtke, Stefan Schwerdfeger |
| 2 | 627 | 5.9 | On the min-cost Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone | Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies | 2017-12-22 | Quang Minh Ha, Yves Deville, Quang Dung Pham et al. |
| 3 | 579 | 6.2 | The Multiple Flying Sidekicks Traveling Salesman Problem: Parcel Delivery with Multiple Drones | Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies | 2019-01-01 | Chase C. Murray, Ritwik Raj |
| 4 | 573 | 6.3 | An adaptive large neighborhood search metaheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with drones | Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies | 2019-03-22 | David Sacramento, David Pisinger, Stefan Røpke |
| 5 | 530 | 7.2 | Drone-aided routing: A literature review | Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies | 2020-09-07 | Giusy Macrina, Luigi Di Puglia Pugliese, Francesca Guerriero et al. |
Research ideas that follow this keyword#
Cite this page
Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “last-mile delivery”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/last-mile-delivery
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-last-mile-delivery,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Papers on “last-mile delivery”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/last-mile-delivery}},
urldate = {2026-11-03},
note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}