Emerging Optimization Problems for Distribution in Same-day Delivery

TL;DR

This paper reviews emerging routing and optimization challenges in same-day delivery services, focusing on dynamic data, environmental concerns, and customer satisfaction, and compares models to guide practical decision-making.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of recent optimization problems and solutions in SDD, highlighting new challenges and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Survey of dynamic routing problems in SDD

Comparison of models for delivery area partitioning

Identification of open research challenges

Abstract

Same-day deliveries (SDD) have become a new standard to satisfy the "instant gratification" of online customers. Despite the existing powerful technologies deployed in last-mile delivery, SDD services face new decision-making challenges related to the trade-off between delivery cost and time. In addition, new challenges related to environmental issues, customer satisfaction, or fairness arise. Researchers have explored various approaches to face these challenges in the context of SDD, where stochastic and dynamic data uncertainty plays a fundamental role. In this paper, we carefully review the emerging routing problems and solutions proposed in the existing literature for SDD services. We survey papers related to how to deal with dynamic arrival times of orders, how to allocate time slots to deliveries, how to select the right delivery options, how to design pickup and delivery routes, or how to partition the delivery areas and decide the composition of the fleet. We also formulate and compare models for representative problems elaborating on the pros and cons that might guide practitioners in choosing the most appropriate objectives and constraints. Finally, we sketch challenges and identify future research directions.