Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery
August 2011
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Many e-tailers providing attended home delivery, especially e-grocers, offer narrow delivery time slots to ensure satisfactory customer service. The choice of delivery time slots has to balance marketing and operational considerations, which results in a complex planning problem. We study the problem of selecting the set of time slots to offer in each of the zip codes in a service region. The selection needs to facilitate cost-effective delivery routes, but also needs to ensure an acceptable level of service to the customer. We present a fully automated approach that is capable of producing high-quality delivery time slot offerings in a short amount of time. Computational experiments reveal the value of this approach and the impact of the environment on the underlying trade-offs.
- C61 : Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis
- M11 : Production Management
- M00 : Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting: General
- R4 : Transportation Systems
- time slot
- time slots
- vehicle
- delivery
- zip codes
- zip code
- schedule
- number
- service
- demand
- time slot schedules
- time slot schedule
- distance
- zip code i
- order
- customer
- model
- result
- problem
- service requirements
