Integrated Shift Scheduling and Load Assignment Optimization for Attended Home Delivery

International audienceIn this paper, we study an integrated shift scheduling and load assignment optimization problem for attended home delivery. The proposed approach is divided into two phases, each one corresponding to a different planning level: tactical and operational. In the tactical planning, a daily master plan is generated for each courier. This master plan defines the working shifts, the origin-destination pairs to visit, and the number of client requests to serve. In the operational planning, delivery orders are allocated to couriers in real-time. The stochastic and dynamic nature of client orders is included in the tactical and operational decision levels, respectively. Results on real-world based instances from a delivery company, demonstrate that our approach provides robust tactical solutions that easily accommodate to fluctuations in client orders, preventing additional costs related to the underutilization of couriers and to the use of external couriers to satisfy all delivery requests

Improving social welfare in non-cooperative games with different types of quantum resources

We investigate what quantum advantages can be obtained in multipartite non-cooperative games by studying how different types of quantum resources can improve social welfare, a measure of the quality of a Nash equilibrium. We study how these advantages in quantum social welfare depend on the bias of the game, and improve upon the separation that was previously obtained using pseudo-telepathic strategies. Two different quantum settings are analysed: a first, in which players are given direct access to an entangled quantum state, and a second, which we introduce here, in which they are only given classical advice obtained from quantum devices. For a given game G, these two settings give rise to different equilibria characterised by the sets of equilibrium correlations Qcorr(G) and Q(G), respectively. We show that Q(G) ⊆ Qcorr(G) and, by considering explicit example games and exploiting SDP optimisation methods, provide indications of a strict separation between the social welfare attainable in the two settings. This provides a new angle towards understanding the limits and advantages of delegating quantum measurements