Flexible Design of Service Time Windows in Online Grocery Delivery
Video
Team Information
Team Members
Xiao Lei, PhD Candidate, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University
Yeqing Zhou, PhD Candidate, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and the Data Science Institute, Columbia University
Faculty Advisor: Adam Elmachtoub, Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University
Abstract
Online Grocery delivery services have become more and more popular due to the advances in mobile and web-based applications. As a result, there is a natural trade-off between serving as many customers as possible and the operational cost to do so. To mitigate the trade-off, one increasingly common approach is to offer large overlapping time windows with a price discount in conjunction with the normal sized ones. When an overlapping window is chosen, the service provider pays a small amount of money for the customer's flexibility. By doing so, the service provider may fulfill the order in a time window that is less busy, reduce the operating costs, and improve the efficiency of the delivery system. We consider how to design the overlapping windows to minimize the operational costs. We propose a choice model framework in presence of overlapping windows, and show that properly designed overlapping windows always provide positive savings, We then conduct several numerical experiments to show and compare the power of different designs of overlapping windows.
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Team Contact: Xiao Lei (use form to send email)
