EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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2687. Robots at Your Service: Covering the Last-Mile in Omnichannel Retail by Robot

Invited abstract in session MB-64: Routing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles 1, stream VeRoLog - Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Monday, 10:30-12:00
Room: S16 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Tobias Huf
University of Augsburg
2. Manuel Ostermeier
University of Augsburg

Abstract

The increasing number of home deliveries paired with various delivery modes and channels require retailers to establish omnichannel networks, integrating stores for direct customer deliveries. This enables versatile shopping opportunities but also increases logistic complexity. The innovative truck-and-robot concept poses an alternative to address the resulting challenges. The concept relies on robots carried and released by trucks to serve customers in predefined time windows. We extend this concept by integrating stores and corresponding customer requests for direct supply from stores, resulting in a new concept that offers robots as a service to pick up and deliver goods to the customers.
The problem described is formalized as the Truck-and-Robot Pickup-and-Delivery Problem (TnR-PDP) and solved using a tailored solution approach, the Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (AGA). The AGA is based on a recombination-based search framework but tailored to the problem-specifics (e.g., no or multiple visits per location) using specialized recombination operators and an adaptive search strategy for location and operator selection. Our numerical experiments show that our algorithm works efficiently, outperforming existing benchmark approaches concerning runtime by up to 83%, while improving the solution quality on benchmark instances. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis regarding store integration is applied to provide managerial insights and highlight the benefits of the proposed concept.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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