Imparting Adaptiveness and Resilience to Parcel Delivery Networks: A Digital Twin Centric Simulation Based Approach

Contemporary parcel delivery companies face a significant surge in demand, along with increased customer expectations for flawless and timely delivery. They must meet these expectations within a shrinking window of opportunity in an increasingly competitive world while dealing with various micro and macro level uncertainties. Current industry practice relying on localized analysis to meet these expectations has turned out ineffective. This paper argues that imparting adaptiveness and resilience to parcel delivery network is the key to a pragmatic solution. It presents a holistic approach based on simulatable digital twins and composable agents to enable “in silico” business experimentation wherein a set of what-if scenarios are simulated to help evaluate efficacy of current strategy and identify suitable modifications to the strategy if necessary. The paper illustrates the proposed approach on a case study from the parcel industry and demonstrates its utility and efficacy on a set of real-life scenarios.