A real-time vehicle dispatching approach integrating spatiotemporal postponement strategy for e-commerce city logistics

Abstract

Postponement strategy is widely adopted to handle the request uncertainty along the supply chain. This study proposes a new postponement strategy considering route visual attractiveness for tackling the order uncertainties in e-commerce city logistics, namely spatiotemporal postponement strategy (STPS). Based on the STPS, a spatiotemporal vehicle dispatching approach (STVDA) is presented to enhance managers’ real time decision-making ability of determining how the fleet of their vehicles effectively fulfill the delivery requests within the serving area in e-commerce environment. Additionally, the mathematical analysis is conducted for guiding the parameter setting of STVDA. As observed in our comparison studies with traditional vehicle dispatching approach, the STVDA can dynamically and efficiently deal with the e-commerce logistics orders and well balance the vehicle traveling distance with order postponement time. Additionally, the STVDA can significantly improve the vehicle route visual attractiveness by sacrificing a little vehicle traveling distance.