Abstract
Postboxes generally represent a cost for a postal service provider since they require to be maintained and daily visited by an operator to collect the letters. On the other hand, for the users, they are the main access points to the postal network and so the reduction of their number could result in a deterioration of the quality of the service for them. This work addresses a real problem involving the reduction of the number of postboxes located in rural areas to reorganize the collection operations of a postal service provider. We formulate this problem as a location-routing problem where the number of postmen employed is minimized guaranteeing the user accessibility. Exact and heuristic solution methods have been developed, tested and compared to existing solution methods on instances based on real data of rural instances showing the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abbatecola, L., Fanti, M.P., Mangini, A.M., Ukovich, W.: A decision support approach for postal delivery and waste collection services. IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng. 13(4), 1458–1470 (2016)
AGCOM (2014). Public consultation on the criteria for the distribution of access points to the public postal network. (Italian Authority for Communication Guarantees). http://www.agcom.int. Accessed 4 February 2020
Balas, E.: The prize collecting traveling salesman problem. Networks 19(6), 621–636 (1989)
Boysen, N., Fedtke, S., Weidinger, F.: Truck scheduling in the postal service industry. Transp. Sci. 51(2), 723–736 (2017)
Bruno, G., Diglio, A., Piccolo, C., Cannavacciuolo, L.: Territorial reorganization of regional blood management systems: evidences from an Italian case study. Omega 89, 54–70 (2019)
Bruno, G., Cavola, M., Diglio, A., Laporte, G., Piccolo, C.: Reorganizing postal collection operations in urban areas as a result of declining mail volumes - a case study in Bologna. J. Oper. Res. Soc. https://doi.org/10.1080/01605682.2020.1736446. to appear (2020)
Drexl, M., Schneider, M.: A survey of variants and extensions of the location-routing problem. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 241(2), 283–308 (2015)
European Parliament and Council of European Union. (1998). Directive 97/67/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 1997. http://www.eur-lex.europa.eu. Accessed 4 February 2020
Garfinkel, R.S., Nemhauser, G.L.: The set-partitioning problem: set covering with equality constraints. Oper. Res. 17(5), 848–856 (1969)
Grunert, T., Sebastian, H.-J.: Planning models for long-haul operations of postal and express shipment companies. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 122(2), 289–309 (2000)
Higgs, G., Langford, M.: Investigating the validity of rural-urban distinctions in the impacts of changing service provision: the example of postal service reconfiguration in Wales. Geoforum 47, 53–64 (2013)
Hong, S.-H., Wolak, F.A.: Relative prices and electronic substitution: Changes in household-level demand for postal delivery services from 1986 to 2004. J. Econometrics 145(1–2), 226–242 (2008)
Jung, H., Lee, K., Chun, W.: Integration of GIS, GPS, and optimization technologies for the effective control of parcel delivery service. Comput. Ind. Eng. 51(1), 154–162 (2006)
Iellamo, S., Alekseeva, E., Chen, L., Coupechoux, M., Kochetov, Y.: Competitive location in cognitive radio networks. 4OR-Q. J. Oper. Res. 13, 81–110 (2015)
Labbe, M., Laporte, G.: Maximizing user convenience and postal service efficiency in post box location. Belgian J. Oper. Res. Stat. Comput. Sci. 26(2), 21–36 (1986)
Masone, A., Sforza, A., Sterle, C., Vasilyev, I.: A graph clustering based decomposition approach for large scale p-median problems. Int. J. Artif. Intell. 16(1), 116–129 (2018)
Masone, A., Sterle, C., Vasilyev, I., Ushakov, A.: A three-stage p-median based exact method for the optimal diversity management problem. Networks 74(2), 174–189 (2019)
Nagy, G., Salhi, S.: Location-routing: issues, models and methods. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 177(2), 649–672 (2007)
Prins, C., Lacomme, P., Prodhon, C.: Order-first split-second methods for vehicle routing problems: a review. Transp. Res. Part C: Emerg. Technol. 40, 179–200 (2014)
Prodhon, C., Prins, C.: A survey of recent research on location-routing problems. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 238(1), 1–17 (2014)
Qu, Y., Bard, J.F.: A grasp with adaptive large neighborhood search for pickup and delivery problems with transshipment. Comput. Oper. Res. 39(10), 2439–2456 (2012)
Zenker, M., Boysen, N.: Dock sharing in cross-docking facilities of the postal service industry. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 69, 1–16 (2018)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Boccia, M., Diglio, A., Masone, A., Sterle, C. (2020). A Location-Routing Based Solution Approach for Reorganizing Postal Collection Operations in Rural Areas. In: Nicosia, G., et al. Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science. LOD 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12565. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64583-0_55
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64583-0_55
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64582-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64583-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)