Territory Planning and Vehicle Dispatching with Driver Learning

Abstract

This paper investigates the construction of routes for local delivery of packages. The primary objective of this research is to provide realistic models to optimize vehicle dispatching when customer locations and demands vary from day to day while maintaining driver familiarity with their service territories, hence dispatch consistency. The objective of increasing driver familiarity tends to make routes or service territories fixed. On the other hand, to serve varying demand it is advantageous to reassign vehicles/drivers and service territories each day. To balance the trade-offs between these two objectives, we developed the concepts of “cell,” “core area,” and “flex zone,” and created a two-stage vehicle routing model—strategic core area design and operational cell routing—and explicitly evaluated the effect of driver familiarity through the use of learning and forgetting curves.

Workforce Management in Periodic Delivery Operations

“…Recent work focuses on driver consistency in the express delivery industry where a company may wish to send the same crew to a customer repeatedly to take advantage of the familiarity the crew establishes with the customer or with the geographic region. Zhong et al (2007) seek to maintain driver familiarity with their service territories. The authors model a learning/forgetting behavior for drivers and show that dispatching drivers consistently to the same geographic areas results in driver familiarity and improved driver performance.…”

“…the marginal benefit of increasing visiting frequency decreases as the frequency increases (see Zhong et al (2007) for a discussion of driver learning behavior). Therefore, the customer access cost for a driver is modeled as a convex function of the frequency with which a customer is visited.…”

Towards an IT-based Planning Process Alignment: Integrated Route and Location Planning for Small Package Shippers

“…Instead of completely fixing the delivery areas, which results in significant problems if demand varies strongly or if time windows are to be considered, we design fixed service territories which only include a predefined proportion of customers (cf. Zhong et al, 2007). In order to balance the tradeoff between familiarity effects and routing flexibility, the remaining flexible customers are integrated into the routes that serve the fixed service territories based on the actual workload on each particular day.…”

Improving road transport operations through lean thinking: a case study

“…Yu et al, 2015;Faulin, 2003;Zhang and Yun, 2009), the vehicle routing problem (e.g. Yu et al, 2013;Lam and Mittenthal, 2013;Kumar et al 2011;Mishra et al 2011;Marinakis and Marinaki, 2008;Zhong et al, 2007), among others, have been addressed. Using mathematical modelling, operations research, and simulation methods, the main approach used by researchers to improve transport operations has been primarily based on minimising cost, time or distance, and optimising resource utilisation, routes, and transportation/delivery schedules.…”