Dynamic container drayage booking and routing decision support approach for E-commerce platforms

•Study a novel dynamic container drayage problem to support decisions for e-commerce drayage platforms.•Propose a multi-stage stochastic programming model considering booking and routing.•Develop an effective two-phase heuristic method to solve the problem in practice.•Draw insights from comparison...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transportation research. Part E, Logistics and transportation review Vol. 177; p. 103220
Main Authors: Chen, Rui, Jia, Shuai, Meng, Qiang
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2023
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ISSN:1366-5545, 1878-5794
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:•Study a novel dynamic container drayage problem to support decisions for e-commerce drayage platforms.•Propose a multi-stage stochastic programming model considering booking and routing.•Develop an effective two-phase heuristic method to solve the problem in practice.•Draw insights from comparison and sensitivity analysis. E-commerce drayage platforms are relatively new to the container drayage industry. Their revenue management poses an enormous logistical challenge owing to the unpredictable demand coupled with complex operations. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic container drayage booking and routing problem with uncertain demand that incorporates important features of this emerging business model from the perspective of an e-commerce drayage platform. We formulate a multi-stage stochastic programming model for problem followed by developing an effective two-phase heuristic method based on a multi-scenario approach to derive both service booking and fleet routing solutions. In the two-phase heuristic, a container drayage service booking sub-problem is solved at the first phase to determine whether each request should be accepted for service or rejected, as well as the time period for serving the accepted requests, while a fleet routing sub-problem is tackled at the second phase to generate work schedules for the tractors and trailers to transport the containers. We conduct comprehensive computational experiments to demonstrate the quality and value of the proposed two-phase heuristic, and reveal insights into the practical operations management of e-commerce drayage platforms.
ISSN:1366-5545
1878-5794
DOI:10.1016/j.tre.2023.103220