Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery

Niels Agatz (), Ann Campbell (), Moritz Fleischmann and Martin Savelsbergh ()
Additional contact information
Niels Agatz: Department of Decision and Information Science, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus Univeristy, 3062 PA DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Ann Campbell: Department of Management Sciences, Tipple College of Business, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Martin Savelsbergh: CISRO Mathematics, Informatics, and Statistics, North Ryde, NSW 1670 Australia

Transportation Science, 2011, vol. 45, issue 3, 435-449

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.

Keywords: e-grocery; home delivery; time slots; vehicle routing; continuous approximation; integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.1100.0346 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery (2008)
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:inm:ortrsc:v:45:y:2011:i:3:p:435-449

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().