Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery

Niels Agatz, AM (Ann Melissa) Campbell, M (Moritz) Fleischmann, Martin Savelsbergh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

183 Citations (Scopus)
203 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)435-449
Number of pages15
JournalTransportation Science
Volume45
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011

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