Attended-Home Delivery (AHD) is the prevailing method for bridging the last-mile between e-grocers, online retailers that sell food, and their customers. There are two major strategies: picking and delivering from dedicated fulfillment centers or picking items in existing stores. Here, we will concentrate on e-grocers that are servicing larger areas from more than one dedicated fulfillment center and investigate the role of flexibility in assigning customers to depots. Since time windows play an important role in the AHD context, the e-grocer is facing a multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows (MDVRPTW).
The MDVRPTW is a topic relatively unexplored in academic literature. We present an exact mixed-integer programming formulation and use this as well as an implementation of a heuristic in order to analyze the benefit of a MDVRPTW solution approach in contrast to a simplistic decomposition by depots. In addition, we investigate the impact of different factors on this benefit as well as on the absolute solution value.
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