We tackle the problem of coordinating a three-echelon last-mile delivery system. In the first echelon, trucks transport parcels from distribution centres outside the city to public transport stops. In the second echelon, the parcels move on public transport and reach the city centre. In the third echelon, zero-emission vehicles pick up the parcels at public … Read more
We consider a routing problem where orders are transported just-in-time from several suppliers to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). This implies that shipments cannot be picked up before their release date when they are ready at the supplier and should be delivered as close as possible to their due date to the OEM. Every shipment … Read more
Rapid delivery systems where an order is delivered to a customer from a local distribution point within minutes or hours have experienced rapid growth recently and often rely on gig economy couriers. The prime example is a meal delivery system. During an operating day, couriers in such a system are used to deliver orders placed … Read more
With the recent boom of the gig economy, urban delivery systems have experienced substantial demand growth. In such systems, orders are delivered to customers from local distribution points respecting a delivery time promise. An important example is a restaurant meal delivery system, where delivery times are expected to be minutes after an order is placed. … Read more
The Vehicle Allocation Problem (VAP) consists of repositioning empty vehicles across a set of terminals over a given planning horizon so as to maximize the profits generated from serving demand for transportation of goods between pair of terminals. This problem has been classically modeled using an extended space-time network which captures the staging of the … Read more
Parcel logistics services play a vital and growing role in economies worldwide, with customers demanding faster delivery of nearly everything to their homes. To move larger volumes more cost effectively, express carriers use sort technologies to consolidate parcels that share similar geographic and service characteristics for reduced per-unit handling and transportation costs. This paper focuses … Read more
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
The Vehicle Allocation Problem (VAP) consists of allocating a fleet of vehicles to attend to the expected demand for freight transportation between terminals along a finite multiperiod planning horizon. The objective is to maximize the profits generated for the completed services. The previous deterministic and stochastic approaches used heuristic procedures and approximations for solving large-scale … Read more
We study a model that optimizes the response to a mass rescue event in Arctic Alaska. The model contains dynamic logistics decisions for a large-scale maritime evacuation with the objectives of minimizing the impact of the event on the evacuees and the average evacuation time. Our proposed optimization model considers two interacting networks – the … Read more
Resource allocation models in contingency planning aim to mitigate unexpected failures in supply chains due to disruptions with rare occurrence but disastrous consequences. This paper formulates this problems as a two-stage stochastic optimization with a risk-averse recourse function, and proposes a novel computationally tractable solution approach. The method relies on an inexact bundle method and … Read more