Online restaurant aggregators have experienced significant sales growth in recent years, driving demand for meal delivery in the US. Meal delivery logistics is quite challenging, primarily due to the difficulty in managing the supply of delivery resources to satisfy dynamic and uncertain customer demand under very tight time constraints. In this paper, we study several … Read more
This paper proposes a two-tier last-mile delivery model that optimally selects mobile depot locations in advance of full information about the availability of crowd-shippers, and then transfers packages to crowd-shippers for the final shipment to the customers. Uncertainty in crowd-shipper availability is incorporated by modeling the problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program. Enhanced decomposition … Read more
We propose the vehicle routing problem with roaming delivery locations (VRPRDL) to model an innovation in last-mile delivery where a customer’s order is delivered to the trunk of his car. We develop construction and improvement heuristics for the VRPRDL based on two problem-specific techniques: (1) efficiently optimizing the delivery locations for a fixed customer delivery … Read more