Day-to-day delivery demand management: Evaluation based on routing efficiency and customer satisfaction

Abstract

As demand for online shopping and home delivery increases rapidly, courier companies often offer services focusing on customer satisfaction. This places strong constraints on the planning of delivery routes for courier vehicles, making delivery routes inefficient. The objective of this study is to present a framework to evaluate demand management policies in terms of the balance between customer satisfaction and delivery efficiency. To this end, we first estimate a delivery option choice model using the stated choice data of e-commerce users. Then, based on day-to-day delivery demand simulated by the estimated model, we optimize a multi-period vehicle routing problem and evaluate the delivery efficiency. We implement two policies: a surcharge for morning delivery and an expansion of the time slot range. The results show that the former significantly reduces customer satisfaction, while the latter achieves higher customer satisfaction and delivery efficiency.