Optimisation for dynamic ride-sharing

For decades, people have looked for ways to maximise personal transportation efficiency, especially for the regular commute between home and work. Particularly in times of economic difficulties, the primary aim is generally to reduce costs by sharing them. However, an important priority for travellers by car is also to find a substitute for inadequate public transport

E-Fulfillment and Multi-Channel Distribution – A Review

This review addresses the specific supply chain management issues of Internet fulfillment in a multi-channel environment. It provides a systematic overview of managerial planning tasks and reviews corresponding quantitative models. In this way, we aim to enhance the understanding of multi-channel e-fulfillment and to identify gaps between relevant managerial issues and academic literature, thereby indicating directions for future research. One of the recurrent patterns in today’s e-commerce operations is the combination of ‘bricks-and-clicks’, the integration of e-fulfillment into a portfolio of multiple alternative distribution channels. From a supply chain management perspective, multi-channel distribution provides opportunities for serving different customer segments, creating synergies, and exploiting economies of scale. However, in order to successfully exploit these opportunities companies need to master novel challenges. In particular, the design of a multi-channel distribution system requires a constant trade-off between process integration and separation across multiple channels. In addition, sales and operations decisions are ever more tightly intertwined as delivery and after-sales services are becoming key components of the product offering.Distribution;E-fulfillment;Literature Review;Online Retailing

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 in E-Fulfillment

Internet retailers are in a unique position to adjust, in real-time, the product and service offering to the customer and to change the corresponding prices. Although this flexibility provides a vast potential for demand management to enhance profitability, standard practices and models to support the decision makers are lacking as of to date. This thesis aims to contribute to closing this gap by systematically investigating demand management approaches in e-fulfillment. We identify relevant novel planning issues through an in-depth case study at a Dutch e-grocer. We focus particularly on attended home delivery, where the Internet retailer applies delivery time slots to coordinate the reception of the purchased goods with the customer. The main levers to manage customer demand in such an environment are the offered time slots and the corresponding delivery fees. The Internet retailer may apply both of these options, slotting and pricing, at different moments in the sales process, either off-line prior to the actual order in-take or real-time as demand unfolds. The thesis presents several decision-support models for time slot management, both forecast-based and in real-time. The computational studies on real-life data demonstrate the viability and the merits of these methods. The results show that a more dynamic and differentiated demand management approach can lead to considerable cost savings and revenue gains

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

Stable Matching for Dynamic Ride-sharing Systems

Dynamic ride-sharing systems enable people to share rides and increase the efficiency of urban transportation by connecting riders and drivers on short notice. Automated systems that establish ride-share matches with minimal input from participants provide the most convenience and the most potential for system-wide performance improvement, such as reduction in total vehicle-miles traveled. Indeed, such systems may be designed to match riders and drivers to maximize system performance improvement. However, system-optimal matches may not provide the maximum benefit to each individual participant. In this paper we consider a notion of stability for ride-share matches and present several mathematical programming methods to establish stable or nearly-stable matches, where we note that ride-share matching optimization is performed over time with incomplete information. Our numerical experiments using travel demand data for the metropolitan Atlanta region show that we can significantly increase the stability of ride-share matching solutions at the cost of only a small degradation in system-wide performance

Strategies for Handling Temporal Uncertainty in Pickup and Delivery Problems with Time Windows

In many real-life routing problems there is more uncertainty with respect to the required timing of the service than with respect to the service locations. We focus on a pickup and delivery problem with time windows in which the pickup and drop-off locations of the service requests are fully known in advance, but the time at which these jobs will require service is only fully revealed during operations. We develop a sample-scenario routing strategy to accommodate a variety of potential time real- izations while designing and updating the routes. Our experiments on a breadth of instances show that advance time related information, if used intelligently, can yield benefits. Furthermore, we show that it is beneficial to tailor the consensus function that is used in the sample-scenario approach to the specifics of the problem setting. By doing so, our strategy performs well on instances with both short time windows and limited advance confirmation

The Value of Inaccurate Advance Time Window Information in a Pick-up and Delivery Problem

We examine different routing strategies to cope with inaccurate time window in- formation in the context of a dynamic pick-up and delivery problem with time windows. Our experiments show that advance information, even if inaccurate, can provide benefits from a planning perspective. We propose a novel stochastic strategy that consistently performs well compared to several benchmark strategies

Optimization Approaches for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone

The fast and cost-efficient home delivery of goods ordered online is logistically challenging. Many companies are looking for new ways to cross the last-mile to their customers. One technology-enabled opportunity that recently has rec