Last Mile Logistics: Impact of Unstructured Addresses on Delivery Times

Abstract

Abstract. The e-commerce industry has seen significant growth over the past few years. One significant issue that has sprung up as a result of this growth is unstructured addresses during last mile delivery. These ambiguous addresses are an established issue, particularly in developing countries like Pakistan. They are difficult to read and locate by last mile delivery riders thereby increasing delivery times and cost, negatively impacting the business of the company. Increased delivery times are also detrimental to the environment. In this paper, we aim to quantify the effects of unstructured addresses on last mile logistics. Many attempts have been made to standardise addresses to tackle this problem. Deep learning based approaches using recurrent neural networks (RNN) as well as probabilistic approaches using hidden Markov models (HMM) have been used. However, the main downside to these approaches are the underlying variation in address schemes in housing societies. We present an end to end rule based pipeline using Levenshtein distance (LD) and regular expressions (RegEx) rules which takes those unstructured addresses and outputs their structured forms along with their Geo-coordinates. The pipeline also returns the optimized route to minimize the last mile distance traveled.