AI-Driven Orchestration of AutoML-Based Demand Forecasting, Fleet Allocation, and Route Optimization in Last-Mile Delivery: A Single-Instance Case Comparison of Metaheuristic and Agentic AI Routing
Background: Last-mile delivery couples demand forecasting, heterogeneous fleet allocation, and routing under time windows, yet these decisions are usually studied in isolation. The object of this study is the forecast-to-route decision pipeline of an urban parcel operator; we examine the hypothesis that no single routi...