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AIT Seminar Series: Mobility Systems

Apr 24
Diego Cattaruzza: Last-mile Delivery Problem with Synchronization Characteristics
 

Abstract

E-commerce is a thriving market around the world and suits very well the busy lifestyle of today's customers. In 2016 consumers in US were purchasing more things online than in stores. This growing e-commerce poses a huge challenge for transportation companies, especially in the last mile delivery that hefty share in total parcel delivery cost often reaches or even exceeds 50%, making it a top concern for many companies. In order to gain a competitive advantage, companies are exploring creative and innovative solutions to improve the efficiency of the last mile delivery.

Nowadays, the most common delivery service is home delivery. Customers wait at home to get their orders. Besides home delivery, companies like Amazon, Fedex, etc., develop locker delivery. When customers shop online, they can choose a nearby locker as a pickup location.

In the recent two years, there is a new concept called trunk delivery that allows to deliver goods to the trunk of a car. Volvo launched its in-car delivery service in Sweden in 2016 which allows the owners of Volvo to choose their cars as delivery locations. What interests us is to combine all these delivery services and study an efficient last mile delivery system. The problem that arises in this context is a vehicle routing problem with synchronization characteristics since when the order is delivered to a customer's car, it requires the simultaneous presence of the shipper and the car at the same location.

In this seminar we consider the one vehicle case. We will formally introduce the problem and the mathematical formulation. We then present a branch-and-cut algorithm developed to tackle the problem and the results that we obtain on benchmark instances.

 

CV

Diego Cattaruzza obtained is PhD from the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne in March 2014 and he currently is Associate Professor at the Ecole Centrale of Lille, France. Cattaruzza is part of the Inria research team INOCS that aims to develop new models, algorithmic techniques and implementations for problems with complex structure. His main research interests are in logistics with applications in city logistics, transportation and warehouse management.

 

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