On the Benefits of Flexible Customer-to-Depot Assignments in Attended Home Delivery

Kilian Seifried, Niels Agatz and Moritz Fleischmann

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: This paper investigates the value of flexibility in customer-to-depot assignments in last-mile distribution operations. In current practice, many companies use fixed delivery regions for their fulfillment warehouses. This allows a decomposition of delivery operations by ware- house, thereby simplifying the planning process. However, this approach foregoes some optimization potential, relative to a holistic planning of the delivery operations across the network. In this paper, we assess the value of this flexibility. We first identify and characterize two specific types of benefits, namely a routing benefit and a pooling benefit. We then proceed to quantify these benefits in an extensive numerical study. Our results disentangle how the benefits depend on key environmental parameters. They also show that a flexible customer-to-depot assignment can add significant value in various relevant conditions.

Keywords: routing; multiple depots; time windows; attended home delivery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2019-04-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/116065/ERS-2019-004-LIS.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:116065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).