Re-route Package Pickup and Delivery Planning with Random Demands

Recently, a higher competition in logistics business introduces new challenges to the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Re-route planning, also known as dynamic VRP, is one of the important challenges. The re-route planning has to be performed when new customers request for deliveries while the delivery vehicles, i.e., trucks, are serving other customers. While the re-route planning has been studied in the literature, most of the existing works do not consider different uncertainties. Therefore, in this paper, we propose two systems, i.e., (i) an offline package pickup and delivery planning with stochastic demands (PDPSD) and (ii) a re-route package pickup and delivery planning with stochastic demands (Re-route PDPSD). Accordingly, we formulate the PDPSD system as a two-stage stochastic optimization. We then extend the PDPSD system to the Re-route PDPSD system with a re-route algorithm. Furthermore, we evaluate performance of the proposed systems by using the dataset from Solomon Benchmark suite and a real data from a Singapore logistics 1company. The results show that the PDPSD system can achieve the lower cost than that of the baseline model. In addition, the Re-route PDPSD system can help the supplier efficiently and successfully to serve more customers while the trucks are already on the road.

Joint Ground and Aerial Package Delivery Services: A Stochastic Optimization Approach

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have emerged as a promising mode of fast, energy-efficient, and cost-effective package delivery. A considerable number of works have studied different aspects of drone package delivery service by a supplier, one of which is delivery planning. However, existing works addressing the planning issues consider a simple case of perfect delivery without service interruption, e.g., due to accident which is common and realistic. Therefore, this paper introduces the joint ground and aerial delivery service optimization and planning (GADOP) framework. The framework explicitly incorporates uncertainty of drone package delivery, i.e., takeoff and breakdown conditions. The GADOP framework aims to minimize the total delivery cost given practical constraints, e.g., traveling distance limit. Specifically, we formulate the GADOP framework as a three-stage stochastic integer programming model. To deal with the high complexity issue of the problem, a decomposition method is adopted. Then, the performance of the GADOP framework is evaluated by using two data sets including Solomon benchmark suite and the real data from one of the Singapore logistics companies. The performance evaluation clearly shows that the GADOP framework can achieve significantly lower total payment than that of the baseline methods which do not take uncertainty into account.

Optimal Stochastic Package Delivery Planning with Deadline: A Cardinality Minimization in Routing

Vehicle Routing Problem with Private fleet and common Carrier (VRPPC) has been proposed to help a supplier manage package delivery services from a single depot to multiple customers. Most of the existing VRPPC works consider deterministic parameters which may not be practical and uncertainty has to be taken into account. In this paper, we propose the Optimal Stochastic Delivery Planning with Deadline (ODPD) to help a supplier plan and optimize the package delivery. The aim of ODPD is to service all customers within a given deadline while considering the randomness in customer demands and traveling time. We formulate the ODPD as a stochastic integer programming, and use the cardinality minimization approach for calculating the deadline violation probability. To accelerate computation, the L-shaped decomposition method is adopted. We conduct extensive performance evaluation based on real customer locations and traveling time from Google Map.

Optimal Stochastic Delivery Planning in Full-Truckload and Less-Than-Truckload Delivery

With an increasing demand from emerging logistics businesses, Vehicle Routing Problem with Private fleet and common Carrier (VRPPC) has been introduced to manage package delivery services from a supplier to customers. However, almost all of existing studies focus on the deterministic problem that assumes all parameters are known perfectly at the time when the planning and routing decisions are made. In reality, some parameters are random and unknown. Therefore, in this paper, we consider VRPPC with hard time windows and random demand, called Optimal Delivery Planning (ODP). The proposed ODP aims to minimize the total package delivery cost while meeting the customer time window constraints. We use stochastic integer programming to formulate the optimization problem incorporating the customer demand uncertainty. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the ODP using test data from benchmark dataset and from actual Singapore road map.