A Multicircle Order Acceptance Strategy for Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems Considering Customer Choice of Last-Mile Delivery Modes and Time Slots

Abstract

A multicircle order acceptance strategy was proposed to decide whether to accept customer requests for specific last-mile delivery modes (including attended home or reception box delivery) and time slots. The strategy was composed of initializing acceptable time slot allocations, reallocating acceptable time slots, matching reference sites, and assessing time slot deviations. A strategy-oriented insertion algorithm for dynamic vehicle routing problems with hard time windows was constructed, thereby showing the proposed strategy achieves a better balance between revenue and distance than the “first come and first served” strategy. Always accepting global optimization result is not significantly better than adopting the result conditionally or based on simulated annealing theory. The distance and revenue gradually increase with the number of reference sites, while revenue/distance ratio decreases. The vehicles are available to serve more attended home delivery orders with a gradual increase in time slot interval, thereby leading to an increase of AHD and total revenue.