Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery
35 Pages Posted: 15 May 2008
Date Written: 16 2008 4,
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 two fully-automated approaches that are capable of producing high-quality delivery time slot offerings in a reasonable amount of time. Computational experiments reveal the value of these approaches and the impact of the environment on the underlying trade-offs.
Keywords: e-grocery, home delivery, time slots, vehicle routing, continuous approximation, integer programming
JEL Classification: M11, R4, M, C61
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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