Recourse strategy for the routing problem of mobile parcel lockers with time windows under uncertain demands

Abstract

It is expected that mobile parcel lockers (MPLs) will provide more responsive and flexible service to the increasing variation of demand than fixed parcel lockers. However, the service provided by MPLs following planned routes can be degraded and even fail due to the demand uncertainty, such as demand volume and pickup time. In this study, we propose an optimization approach integrated with the recourse strategies to overcome this barrier. Three types of uncertain demands and two types of service failures are addressed in this study, with consideration of uncertain demands and time window constraint. To optimally determine the a priori routes for a set of MPLs, we propose a tailored tabu search algorithm by taking into account the recourse cost. A series of numerical experiments were conducted to examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach in enhancing route reliability with a comparison to ordinary express vehicles. The results reveal that the service reliability can be significantly improved with only a marginal increase in the operational cost by the proposed approach.