EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1477. The On-Demand Delivery Problem: Online Assignment of Orders to Warehouses and Couriers

Invited abstract in session TC-64: Dynamic Vehicle Routing 1, stream VeRoLog - Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Tuesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: S16 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Peter Dieter
Management Information Systems, Paderborn University
2. Philipp Speckenmeyer
Paderborn University
3. Guido Schryen
Department of Management Information Systems, Paderborn University

Abstract

The surge in customers' preference for online shopping has spurred the growth of on-demand delivery services, exemplified by companies like Getir, Gorillas, and Flink. These companies promise near-instantaneous deliveries, typically within a few minutes. To be able to fulfill this promise, multiple micro-warehouses and a courier fleet using e-bikes are employed. To address the assignment problem, the current practice of logistics companies is to statically define spatial areas as polygons for each micro-warehouse and assign all customers within this polygon to the respective warehouse. However, such a static assignment neglects real-time information that might be used to achieve a better workload balance of orders between warehouses. In this work, we suggest a dynamic and data-driven assignment of orders to warehouses and couriers based on the current workload and previously assigned orders to the warehouses. The problem is formalized as a sequential decision problem, as customers arrive dynamically over time. The goal is to minimize total tardiness. We develop methods to solve the considered problem and apply them to problem instances on a stylized grid as well as to instances derived from real-world data of Chicago. Our methods are benchmarked to current practices from the industry, showing that a dynamic assignment can substantially reduce tardiness.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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