Abstract
Workforce planning is an operation management problem in the delivery industry to improve service quality and reliability, and the working attitude and passion of drivers, as the direct implementors of delivery service, affect the service level. Consequently, assigning equal workload for drivers so as to improve drivers’ acceptance is a reasonable and efficient workforce plan for managers. This paper investigates a periodic driver routing problem to explore the relationship between workload differential among drivers and total workload; the objective of the optimization problem is to minimize the total workload. To tackle this problem, we first propose a mixed-integer linear programming model, which can be solved by an off-the-shelf mixed-integer linear programming solver, and use the local branching based method to solve larger instances of the problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and solution method, as well as the effect of small workload differential among drivers on the total workload.
Highlights
This paper investigates a periodic driver routing problem to explore the relationship between workload differential among drivers and total workload; the objective of the optimization problem is to minimize the total workload
With the fierce competition of the service industry and the change in consuming ways of people, most competitors realize that decreasing service cost is not advisable for the long-term development of companies
Aiming to improve the service quality and reliability, this paper investigates a driver routing problem (DRP) by considering the workload balance of drivers in a planning period for small-package shipping companies
Summary
With the fierce competition of the service industry and the change in consuming ways of people, most competitors realize that decreasing service cost is not advisable for the long-term development of companies. The direct influence of providing high-quality service is improving the customers’ satisfaction. When customers’ satisfaction rises to a high level, companies can obtain the customers’ loyalty and gain long-term profit. Drivers’ satisfaction is the essential internal factor, and customers’ satisfaction is the most direct and important external factor for gaining profit to companies
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
