Abstract
Freshness of products and timeliness of delivery are two critical factors which have impact on customer satisfaction in terminal delivery of perishable products. This paper investigates how to make a cost-saving vehicle scheduling for perishable products by maximizing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is defined from the two aspects of freshness and time window. Then we develop a priority function based on customer satisfaction and use the hierarchical clustering method to identify customer service priority. Based on the priority, a multiobjective vehicle scheduling optimization model for perishable products is formulated to maximize customer satisfaction and minimize total delivery costs. To solve the proposed model, a priority-based genetic algorithm (PB-GA) is designed. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analysis are performed to show the validity and advantage of our approach. Results indicate that PB-GA can achieve better solutions than traditional genetic algorithm. The improvement of customer satisfaction is higher than the decrease rate of total costs within a certain shelf life range, which reveals that the proposed method is applicable to the terminal delivery of perishable products.
Highlights
With the popularization of online shopping and the improvement of delivery service, more and more customers buy perishable products on Business-to-Customer (B2C) platforms
The result indicates that the delivery plans by priority-based genetic algorithm (PB-GA) are directly affected by the priority constraint; namely, the service sequence order established in each subroute is from high priority to low
The degrees of satisfaction with freshness and time window are effective, with the improvement of 3.29% and 12.27%, respectively. It reveals that PB-GA can promote the freshness of perishable products as well as achieve better solutions to satisfy the expected arrival time for customers
Summary
With the popularization of online shopping and the improvement of delivery service, more and more customers buy perishable products on Business-to-Customer (B2C) platforms. Distributors require to take into account the freshness factor in terminal delivery planning Timeliness is another important factor of customer satisfaction. If distributors are not able to deliver products on time, the customer satisfaction probably decreases Taking these two factors into consideration, it is a difficulty for logistics service providers to ensure freshness and timeliness during terminal delivery because perishable products need to be handled in a special way not the traditional cost-saving way. From the customer satisfaction view, we study a multiobjective vehicle scheduling problem for perishable products in terminal delivery. (2) Taking customer service priority as one of constraints, we establish a multiobjective vehicle scheduling optimization model for perishable products.
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