G. Ninikas, Th. Athanasopoulos, V. Zeimpekis, I. Minis

Routing in Hybrid Courier Operations, Technical Report, December 2010

We present the design and evaluation of an enhanced fleet management system that supports planners and dispatchers of courier operations in two significant current issues: a) Planning mass deliveries over a multiple-day horizon, and b) allocating, in real-time, dynamic requests that occur during service execution. In the former case, we proposed a method to assign service requests with some flexibility in a multi-period horizon, taking into account typical routes expected to be executed within this horizon. For the allocation of dynamic requests, we propose an intelligent insertion heuristic to provide efficient solutions within reasonable computational times.  Both methods have been implemented in a commercial fleet management platform, and have been tested in a Greek courier operator. The results indicate that the system, enhanced by the proposed methods, may improve significantly the pickup and delivery operations of a courier company.
Keywords. Express logistics, fleet management systems, replanning in vehicle routing, multi-period vehicle routing