Building Trust in Home Services—Stochastic Team-Orienteering with Consistency Constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we consider service applications where drivers serve subscription customers at their homes on a regular basis and at known times. To build trust with customers, the company requires that subscription customers are consistently served by the same driver. In addition to subscription customers, on-demand customers request delivery on a daily basis. For the company, the challenge is to consistently serve the subscription customers while simultaneously maximizing the daily profit from the on-demand customers. We model the problem as a two-stage stochastic decision problem. The first stage determines the assignment of drivers to subscription customers. The second stage is a team-orienteering problem with time windows and mandatory visits by fixed drivers. We present an anticipatory consistent customer assignment policy (ACCA) based on the multiple scenario approach framework. Our computational study shows that ACCA significantly outperforms consistency concepts from the literature, while increasing costs less than 5%.