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Title:
Coordinated Delivery to Shopping Malls with Limited Docking Capacity

Abstract:
Shopping malls are densely located in densely populated cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Tenants in these shopping malls generate a large number of freight orders to their contracted logistics service providers, who then independently plan their own delivery schedules. These uncoordinated deliveries and the limited docking capacity often jointly cause congestion at the shopping malls. We study a coordination strategy in which a delivery coordination platform centrally schedules vehicle routes for multiple logistics service providers, and simultaneously reserves the dock time slot for each order delivery. Vehicle routing and dock scheduling decisions are made jointly against the backdrop of travel time and service time uncertainty. We model this problem as a two-stage stochastic mixed integer program, develop an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search algorithm that approximates the second stage recourse function using various sample sizes, and examine the associated in-sample and out-of-sample stability. Our numerical study on a testbed of instances based on real data in Singapore demonstrates the value of coordination and the value of stochastic solutions.

Bio:
Dr. Lei Zhao is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Tsinghua University. His research focuses on computational stochastic optimization methodologies (stochastic programming, approximate dynamic programming, simulation optimization) and their applications in logistics and transportation management (esp. urban delivery in megacities), supply chain risk management, and medical decision making. Dr. Zhao’s research has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MoST) as well as industry collaborators such as Sinoair, Sinopec, China Tobacco, COSCO Shipping Technology/COSCONET, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, General Mills, IBM, etc. He has publications in Annals of Operations Research, Computers & Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, OR Spectrum, Transportation Research Part B, C, & E, and Transportation Science, etc.