Online restaurant aggregators with integrated meal delivery networks have become more common and more popular in the past few years. Meal delivery is arguably the ultimate challenge in last mile logistics: a typical order is expected to be delivered within an hour (much less if possible), and within minutes of the food becoming ready. We … Read more
In this research, we consider the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with release dates. The goal of this scheduling problem is to find an optimal job assignment with minimal sum of weighted completion times. As it is demonstrated in the present paper, this problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Albeit the computational complexity, which … Read more
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
Contract carriers in the trucking industry are known to offer shippers a per mile rate that decreases stepwise as the shipper’s route lengthens, with a mileage band designated for each rate. While the use of quantity-based pricing discounts in supply chains has been well studied, there has been no research on how shippers should route … Read more
We consider a system with an evolving state that can be stopped at any time by a decision maker (DM), yielding a state-dependent reward. The DM does not observe the state except for a limited number of monitoring times, which he must choose, in conjunction with a suitable stopping policy, to maximize his reward. Dealing … Read more
We introduce the Meal Delivery Routing Problem (MDRP) to formalize and study an important emerging class of dynamic delivery operations. We develop optimization-based algorithms tailored to solve the courier assignment (dynamic vehicle routing) and capacity management (offline shift scheduling) problems encountered in meal delivery operations. Extensive computational experiments using instances with realistic size, geography, urgency … Read more
Extending the concept of time-space networks, layered graphs associate information about one or multiple resource state values with nodes and arcs. While integer programming formulations based on them allow to model complex problems comparably easy, their large size makes them hard to solve for non-trivial instances. We detail and classify layered graph modeling techniques that … Read more
In this paper, we study the class of linear and discrete optimization problems in which the objective coefficients are chosen randomly from a distribution, and the goal is to evaluate robust bounds on the expected optimal value as well as the marginal distribution of the optimal solution. The set of joint distributions is assumed to … Read more
In Food Industry, the combined treatments based on high-pressure and temperature (HPT) are frequently used to increment the durability of the products without damaging their good properties. However, achieving a reasonable compromise between conservation and quality is usually a challenging task. In a previous work, we proposed a decision tool which solves a multi-objective optimization … Read more
In this paper, we study an analytical approach to selecting expansion locations for retailers selling add-on products whose demand is derived from the demand of another base product. Demand for the add-on product is realized only as a supplement to the demand of the base product. In our context, either of the two products could … Read more