The Method of Calculating the Assembly and Delivery Plan for Groups of Cargoes in the Special VRPTW Problem of Intra-city Food Delivery

摘要

A method of calculating the delivery plan concerning the coordination with a storehouse picker's schedule for intra-city food delivery has been analyzed and is being proposed. In order to assemble a client's order storehouse pickers are employed, who, upon notification collect the necessary items for packaging and delivery. The pickers' assembly schedule should be consistent with couriers' intended schedule of travel around the city: delivering packages to clients according to the clients' preferred time windows. It is necessary to calculate a coordinated and conditionally optimal plan for storehouse pickers on the one hand, and for courier drivers on the other, taking into account their mutual interrelationship. At the same time, it is required to be able to provide a desired time window for delivery of the orders to the clients. These calculations result in minimizing the couriers' routes, by taking into account the forecast of traffic congestion at certain times of the day and adaptively redistributing the assembly of packages (order filling) to other stores, if all pickers in the current location are overloaded.