Same-Day Delivery with Drone Resupply

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have recently seen an increased level of interest as their potential use in same-day home delivery has been promoted and advocated by large retailers and courier delivery companies. We introduce a novel way to exploit drones in same-day home delivery settings: drone resupply. We consider a … Read more

Comparative Analysis of Capacitated Arc Routing Formulations for Branch-Cut-and-Price Algorithms

The current best exact algorithms for the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem are based on the combination of cut and column generation. This work presents a deep theoretical investigation of the formulations behind those algorithms, classifying them and pointing similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages. In particular, we discuss which families of cuts and branching strategies … Read more

Business-to-Consumer E-Commerce: Home Delivery in Megacities

To deliver to consumers in densely populated urban areas, companies often employ a two-echelon logistics system. In a two-echelon logistics system, the entry point for goods to be delivered in the urban area is a city distribution center (CDC). From a CDC the goods are transported to an intermediate facility, from where the goods are … Read more

Mathematical models for Multi Container Loading Problems with practical constraints

We address the multi container loading problem of a company that has to serve its customers by first putting the products on pallets and then loading the pallets into trucks. We approach the problem by developing and solving integer linear models. To be useful in practice, our models consider three types of constraints: geometric constraints, … Read more

Crowdshipping and Same-day Delivery: Employing In-store Customers to Deliver Online Orders

Same-day delivery of online orders is becoming an indispensable service for large retailers. We explore an environment in which in-store customers supplement company drivers and can take on the task of delivering online orders on their way home. Because online orders as well as in-store customers willing to make deliveries arrive throughout the day, it … Read more

Bi-objective autonomous vehicle repositioning problem with travel time uncertainty

We study the problem of repositioning autonomous vehicles in a shared mobility system in order to simultaneously minimize the unsatisfied demand and the total operating cost. We first present a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the deterministic version of the problem, and based on that we develop an extended formulation that is easier to … Read more

Robust Optimization for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Deliverymen

This paper studies the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen in which customer demands are uncertain and belong to a predetermined polytope. In addition to the routing decisions, this problem aims to define the number of deliverymen used to provide the service to the customers on each route. A new mathematical formulation … Read more

Distributionally Robust Markovian Traffic Equilibrium

Stochastic user equilibrium models are fundamental to the analysis of transportation systems. Such models are typically developed under the assumption of route based choice models for the users. A class of link based models under a Markovian assumption on the route choice behavior of the users has been proposed to deal with the drawbacks of … Read more

The uncapacitated p-hub center problem under the existence of zero flows

In this study, we consider the special case of the uncapacitated p-hub center problem, where the weight/flow matrix includes 0 entities. In some real life networks, such as airline networks, cargo networks etc., the zero flow might exist between certain demand points. Typically in airline networks, nobody travels from city i to city i. In … Read more

Optimizing regular symmetric timetables: a method to reach the best modal split for railway

A regular timetable is a collection of events that repeat themselves every specific time span. This even structure, whenever applied at a whole network, leads to several benefits both for users and the company, although some issues are introduced, especially about dimensioning the service. It is therefore fundamental to properly consider the interaction between the … Read more