Dynamic Time Window Adjustment

To improve customer satisfaction in a delivery network with uncertain travel times, we propose to communicate time window adjustments to the customers throughout the day. We refer to these updates as dynamic time window adjustments. Dynamic time window adjustments are often used in practice, but have not yet been considered in the scientific literature. We provide a general model and we present the Dynamic Time Window Adjustment Problem (DTWAP). The DTWAP is the problem of optimizing the dynamic time window adjustments to maximize the expected customer satisfaction for a given route. Instead of solving the DTWAP in a specific setting, we derive general properties and we present three different solution methods. We also introduce the simple DTWAP, which is a special case that we analyze in more detail. The use of our results is demonstrated with an illustrative example concerning attended home delivery.