The price of customer presence in Attended Home Delivery with Customer Availability Profiles
Roberto Zanotti, Daniele Manerba, Renata Mansini
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2025F1656
Citation: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS), M. Bolanowski, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, D. Ślęzak (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 43, pages 625–634 (2025)
Abstract. Attended Home Delivery is a last-mile distribution paradigm in which the customer must be present at home during the service. In this context, we study a vehicle routing and scheduling problem in which the availability of the customers is given as a probability profile throughout the working day and where the company incurs a penalty proportional to the probability of not finding the customer at home during the timeslot selected for the delivery. Using an efficient Mixed-Integer Linear Programming formulation for the problem as a black-box tool and lexicographic optimization procedures, we develop an economic analysis able to support the company in exploiting the trade-off existing between the basic optimization and the possibility of increasing the customer presence probabilities by paying additional costs. Managerial insights are derived from the optimal solutions' values and structure against several budgets available to invest in improving the presence profiles.
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