Customer Satisfaction and Pricing in E-Retail Delivery

We study a system in which a common delivery fleet provides service to both same-day delivery (SDD) and next-day delivery (NDD) orders placed by e-retail customers who are sensitive to delivery prices. We develop a model of the system and optimize with respect to two separate objectives. First, empirical research suggests that fulfilling e-retail orders … Read more

Optimizing the Trade-Off Between Batching and Waiting: Subadditive Dispatching

Motivated by applications in e-commerce logistics where orders or items arrive at different times and must be dispatched or processed in batches, we propose the subadditive dispatching problem (SAD), a strongly NP-hard problem defined by a set of orders with release times and a non-decreasing subadditive dispatch time function. A single uncapacitated vehicle must dispatch … Read more

Who Has Access to E-Commerce and When? Time-Varying Service Regions in Same-Day Delivery

Motivated by access and equity issues in e-commerce, we study the design of same-day delivery (SDD) systems under the assumption that service regions are allowed to vary over the course of the day; equivalently, that customers in different locations may have access to SDD for different lengths of time over the service day or may … 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