Seminar Series

2022 - 2023

Speaker: Yannick Scherr (U of Vienna).

Title: “Request acceptance with overbooking in dynamic and collaborative vehicle routing”

joint with Margaretha Gansterer (U of Klagenfurt) and Richard Hartl (U of Vienna).

Date: Thursday, November 24th at 12h30 (Paris Time).

Abstract: We consider the problem setting of a less-than-truckload carrier serving stochastic customer requests. Each request must be answered dynamically by accepting or rejecting it immediately. On the next day, the accepted requests are served in routes using a set of vehicles with limited load capacity and route duration. After the request acceptance phase and before the requests must be served, multiple carriers participate in a combinatorial auction to exchange a subset of requests among each other. After carriers place bids on bundles of requests, an auctioneer allocates the bundles to carriers in a cost-minimizing way and distributes the auction profits equally. This type of horizontal collaboration provides cost savings to the carriers and contributes to reducing negative impacts of transportation such as emissions or congestion. We describe the carrier’s optimization problem of maximizing profit as a Markov decision process that comprises the sequential decisions in all phases, i.e., request acceptance, request selection for the auction, bidding, and routing. For solving a dynamic version of the vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries, heuristic approaches are proposed that achieve efficient and balanced routes. We design overbooking policies for strategically accepting more requests bearing in mind the options provided by the auction. Computational results show that – by trading requests in an auction – carriers can accept more requests than they could serve on their own. The carriers’ request acceptance decisions impact their individual profits and the overall collaboration savings. The largest benefits can be achieved with an overbooking policy that prescribes which requests should be accepted by all carriers, based on the locations of both the request and the carriers’ depots.

Bio: Here is a link to the speaker’s website

https://bda.univie.ac.at/team/details/user/scherry99/inum/1850/backpid/85445/

You are cordially invited to participate to the seminar, which will take place in Room 204, Bosco building. 

For more information, please contact: Pierre Mella-Barral p.mella-barral@tbs-education.fr