The Paper of the Year Award recognises outstanding contributions published in Transportation Science, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The journal focuses on techniques for researching critical challenges in transportation operation, which includes air travel, rail transport, commuter systems, and vehicular traffic management.
Controlling concurrent deliveries
Niels Agatz’s research looked at the process of customers choosing delivery time slots and how those slots are dynamically managed according to how many delivery vehicles are available, particularly when multiple customers interact with the online booking system at the same time. These kinds of concurrent interactions are a common and important challenge for retailers that use systems for providing home delivery, but there’s not much academic research into the problem. The research was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), ORTEC, and AH.nl, the Netherlands’ largest supermarket.
Niels and his co-researchers present a control strategy and several approaches for planning fast routes that manage time slots in real time. The researchers combined fast response times with high quality slotting decisions by introducing background procedures that use the time between successive order being placed to improve the performance of the offer of a time slot and validation procedures.
Their detailed computational experiments, based on realistic instances, provide insights into the effectiveness of background procedures and the complex trade-offs between waiting times, valid orders, and invalid orders. This innovative background optimisation procedures that anticipate customer demand in real time, ultimately increasing the number of valid bookings and reducing delivery failures.
Shaping the future of online delivery
As e-commerce grows, so does the problem of accounting for concurrent customer interactions in online booking systems. The researchers say they are honoured that the impact of their research has been recognised by Transportation Science.
Read the research paper
Managing Concurrent Interactions in Online Time Slot Booking Systems for Attended Home Delivery in Transportation Science.
