EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2855. Volume balancing in the mail sorting process at a French postal company

Invited abstract in session WA-12: Batch scheduling, stream Scheduling and Project Management.

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: Clarendon SR 1.02

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Emmanuelle Amann
2. Evgeny Gurevsky
LS2N, University of Nantes
3. Arnaud LAURENT
Nantes Université

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, traditional postal operators have faced dual challenges: a sharp decline in mail volumes and an increased number of distribution points. In France, La Poste has to adapt its organization to remain at the cutting edge of customer service. Industrial platforms are the central core of mail delivery, where mails are arranged by routes using sorting machines in the order of their dispatching, to facilitate their distribution by mail carriers. Because of declining mail traffic, sorting machines are underutilized, and outdated sorting procedures are no longer efficient. The issue is to optimize mail processing while maintaining traditional obligations. Route preparation requires a sorting process in two steps. With the current variability of postal traffic, the historical view based on the day of the week may lead to an imbalance in the volume of mail at the outputs of the sorting machine. Obtaining a smooth distribution of the volume in the sorting machine outputs would be of significant interest to improve operation’s handling and prevent technical issues. This challenge can be viewed as a variant of the SALBP: allocate a set of mails to containers, while optimizing a smoothness criterion and respecting various industrial constraints. We propose a MILP model and a heuristic approach, to handle academic and industrial instances. The heuristic was implemented at La Poste and has since been used daily by industrial mail platforms in France.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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