A policy of picking up parcels for express courier service in dynamic environments

Abstract

As a particular logistics service, the express courier service has seen considerable growth recently, which resulted in an unprecedented fierce competition. Besides, the development of information and communication technologies has enabled express company to manage their service. With the purpose of improving service quality and operation efficiency for express company, we focus on the problem of intercity express courier routing in courier-triggered pickup service. A novel pickup policy for courier routing is proposed based on the idea of centrality measures and the nearest-neighbour (NN) policy by considering the un-serviced customer requests as a globally coupled network. This policy enables to dispatch the idle courier to the more central request location, which allows the courier to easily serve the neighbouring requests around the central request location, thus securing both global and local performance. We also propose a simple prototype of real-time fleet management system where the proposed pickup policy is embedded into it. To evaluate the efficiency and practicability of the pickup policy, we conduct comprehensive computational experiments to generate various testing scenarios; moreover, two widely used dispatching policies – NN and first-come-first-served (FCFS) – are considered as the benchmark policy. Results show that the proposed pickup policy significantly outperforms the NN and FCFS policies in terms of waiting time and total service time.

Keywords:

• express courier service
• pickup process
• dynamic routing
• network analysis
• centrality measures
• dispatching policy

Notes

1. Another kind of courier service is intra-city express courier service which only contains the pickup process and delivery process due to the short distance between origin and destination. The courier routing for intra-city service is the classic pickup and delivery problem which has been well studied, such as D’Souza, Omkar, et al. (2012), Masson, Ropke, et al. (2014), Nanry and Barnes (2000) and Ropke and Pisinger (2006).

2. The idea of the Equation (1(1) ) is from the centrality measures, particularly, the degree centrality. We consider the reciprocal of as the weight of edges. However, in order to deal with the situation where equals zero, we add 1 in the denominator.

3. As the space restriction of the format of this paper, we investigate the influence of w on the performance of the centrality-based pickup policy in the Supplementary Information.