Fleet Sizing and Service Region Partitioning for Same-Day Delivery Systems

We study the linked tactical design problems of fleet sizing and partitioning a service region into vehicle routing zones for same-day delivery (SDD) systems. Existing SDD studies focus primarily on operational dispatch problems and do not consider system design questions. Prior work on SDD system design has not considered the fleet sizing decision when a … Read more

Two-Stage Sort Planning for Express Parcel Delivery

Recent years have brought significant changes in the operations of parcel transportation services, most notably due to the growing demand for e-commerce worldwide. Parcel sortation systems are used within sorting facilities in these transportation networks to enable the execution of effective consolidation plans with low per-unit handling and shipping costs. Designing and implementing effective parcel … Read more

Dynamic Node Packing

We propose a dynamic version of the classical node packing problem, also called the stable set or independent set problem. The problem is defined by a node set, a node weight vector, and an edge probability vector. For every pair of nodes, an edge is present or not according to an independent Bernoulli random variable … Read more

Order Acceptance in Same-Day Delivery

We study order acceptance dynamics in same-day delivery systems by formulating the Dynamic Dispatch Waves Problem with Immediate Acceptance, which models integrated request management and order distribution for dynamically arriving requests. When a delivery request arrives, a decision is made immediately to accept (offer service) or reject (with a penalty). Accepted requests are not available … Read more

Tactical Design of Same-Day Delivery Systems

We study tactical models for the design of same-day delivery (SDD) systems. Same-day fulfillment in e-commerce has seen substantial growth in recent years, and the underlying management of such services is complex. While the literature includes operational models to study SDD, they tend to be detailed, complex, and computationally difficult to solve, and thus may … Read more

A Column and Constraint Algorithm for the Dynamic Knapsack Problem with Stochastic Item Sizes

We consider a version of the knapsack problem in which an item size is random and revealed only when the decision maker attempts to insert it. After every successful insertion the decision maker can choose the next item dynamically based on the remaining capacity and available items, while an unsuccessful insertion terminates the process. We … Read more

Acyclic Mechanism Design for Freight Consolidation

Freight consolidation is a logistics practice that improves the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of transportation operations, and also reduces energy consumption and carbon footprint. A “fair” shipping cost sharing scheme is indispensable to help establish and sustain the cooperation of a group of suppliers in freight consolidation. In this paper, we design a truthful acyclic mechanism … Read more

Branch-and-Price for Routing with Probabilistic Customers

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Probabilistic Customers (VRP-PC) is a fundamental building block within the broad family of stochastic routing models, and has two decision stages. In the first stage, a dispatcher determines a set of vehicle routes serving all potential customer locations, before actual requests for service realize. In the second stage, vehicles are … Read more

Dynamic Relaxations for Online Bipartite Matching

Online bipartite matching (OBM) is a fundamental model underpinning many important applications, including search engine advertisement, website banner and pop-up ads, and ride-hailing. We study the i.i.d. OBM problem, where one side of the bipartition is fixed and known in advance, while nodes from the other side appear sequentially as i.i.d. realizations of an underlying … Read more

Relaxation Analysis for the Dynamic Knapsack Problem with Stochastic Item Sizes

We consider a version of the knapsack problem in which an item size is random and revealed only when the decision maker attempts to insert it. After every successful insertion the decision maker can dynamically choose the next item based on the remaining capacity and available items, while an unsuccessful insertion terminates the process. We … Read more