Seminar

Abstract

Rapid urban growth, the increasing importance of e-commerce and high consumer service expectations have given rise to new and innovative models for freight delivery within urban environments. Crowdsourced solutions  -- where drivers are not employed by a carrier but occasionally offer their services through on-line platforms and are contracted as required by carriers -- are receiving growing attention from industry. We consider a crowdsourced system where drivers express their availability to perform delivery tasks for a given period of time and the platform communicates a schedule with requests to serve.  We investigate the potential benefits of introducing transfers to support driver activities. At transfer locations, drivers can drop off packages for pick up by other drivers at a later time. We frame the problem as a Multi-Depot Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Transfers, and propose an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search algorithm that effectively identifies beneficial transfer opportunities and synchronizes driver operations. Computational experiments indicate that introducing transfer options can significantly reduce system-wide travel distance as well as the number of drivers required to serve a given set of requests, especially when drivers have short availability and requests have high service requirements.

Short Bio

Dr. Luuk Veelenturf is an Assistant Professor at Operations Planning Accounting & Control, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He received his PhD in Business Processes, Logistics & Information Systems in from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. He also holds a BSc and MSc degree in Econometrics and Management Science from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Luuk is a participant in the DATA2MOVE initiative, a research community and eco-system on the interface of IoT, Big Data and Logistics / Supply Chain Management involving TU/e, Tilburg University and prominent industry partners. Luuk has acted as a guest editor on the journal Transportation research part C: emerging technologies and has worked on the organizing committees of CASPT (Rotterdam 2015) and TRISTAN (Aruba 2016). Furthermore, he has participated in the projects ON-TIME (EU FP7) and CONCOORD (EU JPI Urban Europe). His research interests lie mainly in the area of real-time transport and mobility operations, with a specific focus on public transport planning, railway disruption management, city logistics, vehicle routing & pickup and delivery variants and data-driven transport operations. A large part of Luuk’s research focuses on sustainable transportation and algorithms to support logistics-related decision making. This is increasingly important, as delivery times and volumes increase. As it is impossible to wait until all information has been collected before decisions are made, smart dynamics and stochastics will become more important.  By improving systems and schedules, Luuk aims to make public transport a more attractive and sustainable alternative to car transportation and make city logistics more efficient, thereby reducing CO2 emissions and congestion. By ensuring the capacity of trucks fully utilized, for example, less trucks need to enter city centers.