Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery

Many e-tailers providing attended home delivery, especially e-grocers, offer narrow delivery time slots to ensure satisfactory customer service. The choice of delivery time slots has to balance marketing and operational considerations, which results in a complex planning problem. We study the problem of selecting the set of time slots to offer in each of the zip codes in a service region. The selection needs to facilitate cost-effective delivery routes, but also needs to ensure an acceptable level of service to the customer. We present two fully-automated approaches that are capable of producing high-quality delivery time slot offerings in a reasonable amount of time. Computational experiments reveal the value of these approaches and the impact of the environment on the underlying trade-offs.integer programming;vehicle routing;continuous approximation;e-grocery;home delivery;time slots

Demand Management Opportunities in E-fulfillment: What Internet Retailers Can Learn from Revenue Management

In this paper, we explain how Internet retailers can learn from proven revenue management concepts and use them to reduce costs and enhance service. We focus on attended deliveries as these provide the greatest opportunities and challenges. The key driver is service differentiation. Revenue management has shown that companies can do much better than a one-size-fits-all first-come-first-serve strategy when selling scarce capacity to a heterogeneous market. Internet retailers have strong levers at their disposal for actively steering demand, notably the offered delivery time windows and their associated prices. Unlike traditional revenue management, these demand management decisions affect both revenues and costs. This calls for a closer coordination of marketing and operations than current common practice.ketenbeheer;revenue management;home delivery;E-fulfillment;demand management;marketing-operations interface

A structural approach to kernels for ILPs: Treewidth and Total Unimodularity

Kernelization is a theoretical formalization of efficient preprocessing for NP-hard problems. Empirically, preprocessing is highly successful in practice, for example in state-of-the-art ILP-solvers like CPLEX. Motivated by this, previous work studied the existence of kernelizations for ILP related problems, e.g., for testing feasibility of Ax <= b. In contrast to the observed success of CPLEX, however, the results were largely negative. Intuitively, practical instances have far more useful structure than the worst-case instances used to prove these lower bounds. In the present paper, we study the effect that subsystems with (Gaifman graph of) bounded treewidth or totally unimodularity have on the kernelizability of the ILP feasibility problem. We show that, on the positive side, if these subsystems have a small number of variables on which they interact with the remaining instance, then we can efficiently replace them by smaller subsystems of size polynomial in the domain without changing feasibility. Thus, if large parts of an instance consist of such subsystems, then this yields a substantial size reduction. We complement this by proving that relaxations to the considered structures, e.g., larger boundaries of the subsystems, allow worst-case lower bounds against kernelization. Thus, these relaxed structures can be used to build instance families that cannot be efficiently reduced, by any approach.Comment: Extended abstract in the Proceedings of the 23rd European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2015

The Value of Optimization in Dynamic Ride-Sharing: a Simulation Study in Metro Atlanta

Smartphone technology enables dynamic ride-sharing systems that bring together people with similar itineraries and time schedules to share rides on short-notice. This paper considers the problem of matching drivers and riders in this dynamic setting. We develop optimization-based approaches that aim at minimizing the total system-wide vehicle miles and individual travel costs. To assess the merits of our methods we present a simulation study based on 2008 travel demand data from metropolitan Atlanta. The simulation results indicate that the use of sophisticated optimization methods instead of simple greedy matching rules may substantially improve the performance of ride-sharing systems. Furthermore, even with relatively low participation rates, it appears that sustainable populations of dynamic ride-sharing participants may be possible even in relatively sprawling urban areas with many employment centers

The "mirror box" illusion: effect of visual information on bimanual coordination in children with spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsy

The study examined symmetrical bimanual coordination of children with spastic hemiparetic cerebral palsy (SHCP) and a typically developing (TD) control group under conditions of visual feedback created by placing a glass screen, opaque screen or a mirror (“mirror box”) between the arms. The “mirror box” creates a visual illusion, which gives rise to a visual perception of a zero lag, symmetric movement between the two arms. Children with SHCP exhibited a similar mean coordination pattern as the TD control group, but had greater movement variability between the arms. Furthermore, movement variability in children with SHCP was significantly greater in the screen condition compared with the glass and mirror condition, which were similar to each other. The effects of the availability of visual feedback in individuals with hemiparesis are discussed with reference to central and peripheral mechanisms

Sustainable Passenger Transportation: Dynamic Ride-Sharing

Ride-share systems, which aim to bring together travelers with similar itineraries and time schedules, may provide significant societal and environmental benefits by reducing the number of cars used for personal travel and improving the utilization of available seat capacity. Effective and efficient optimization technology that matches drivers and riders in real-time is one of the necessary components for a successful ride-share system. We formally define dynamic ride-sharing and outline the optimization challenges that arise when developing technology to support ride-sharing. We hope that this paper will encourage more research by the transportation science and logistics community in this exciting, emerging area of public transportation