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International Conference on Computational Logistics

ICCL 2015: Computational Logistics pp 61–75Cite as

An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach to Urban Freight Distribution with Batch Arrivals

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 9335)

Abstract

We study an extension of the delivery dispatching problem (DDP) with time windows, applied on LTL orders arriving at an urban consolidation center. Order properties (e.g., destination, size, dispatch window) may be highly varying, and directly distributing an incoming order batch may yield high costs. Instead, the hub operator may wait to consolidate with future arrivals. A consolidation policy is required to decide which orders to ship and which orders to hold. We model the dispatching problem as a Markov decision problem. Dynamic Programming (DP) is applied to solve toy-sized instances to optimality. For larger instances, we propose an Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) approach. Through numerical experiments, we show that ADP closely approximates the optimal values for small instances, and outperforms two myopic benchmark policies for larger instances. We contribute to literature by (i) formulating a DDP with dispatch windows and (ii) proposing an approach to solve this DDP.

Keywords

  • Urban distribution
  • Transportation planning
  • Consolidation
  • Approximate dynamic programming

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Wouter van Heeswijk, Martijn Mes & Marco Schutten

Authors
  1. Wouter van Heeswijk
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  2. Martijn Mes
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  3. Marco Schutten
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wouter van Heeswijk .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Francesco Corman

  2. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Stefan Voß

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Rudy R. Negenborn

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van Heeswijk, W., Mes, M., Schutten, M. (2015). An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach to Urban Freight Distribution with Batch Arrivals. In: Corman, F., Voß, S., Negenborn, R. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9335. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24263-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24264-4

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