Mathematical Programming with Stochastic Equilibrium Constraints applied to Optimal Last-mile Delivery Services

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• 作者：B. Tounsi
• 关键词：E-commerce ; stochastic user equilibrium ; bi-level programming ; heuristics
• 刊名：Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：June 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：52
• 期：Complete
• 页码：5-12
• 全文大小：202 K

文摘

In e-commerce business, the delivery of products is a crucial part for the success of an e-shop. An efficient delivery system should offer various services and predict customers behaviour. The latter are influenced by the price of a delivery service, but also by its quality (perceived through congestion effect induced by customers' choices). In this study, we introduce a bi-level model to optimize a delivery system. At the upper level, the provider control services' tariffs. At the lower level, users react by choosing their delivery service according to a disutility function which incorporates the provider tariff and the congestion effects. We model the customers' reaction using stochastic user equilibrium (SUE). We also present a sensitivity analysis for the SUE that gives explicit expression of the derivatives of customers distribution with respect to services' tariffs. Based on a local search that exploits the derivatives information, a new heuristic algorithm for a delivery services pricing problem is developed and compared to others existing methods.