Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery

Niels Agatz, Ann Melissa Campbell, Moritz Fleischmann and Martin Savelsbergh

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: 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: continuous approximation; e-grocery; home delivery; integer programming; time slots; vehicle routing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 M M11 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-04-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Journal Article: Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery (2011)
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