Related papers: Order batching using an approximation for the dist…
We study the dynamic pooling of multiple orders into a single trip, a strategy widely adopted by online delivery platforms. When an order has to be dispatched, the platform must determine which (if any) of the available orders to pool it…
In order for an e-commerce platform to maximize its revenue, it must recommend customers items they are most likely to purchase. However, the company often has business constraints on these items, such as the number of each item in stock.…
We study routing for on-demand last-mile logistics with two crucial novel features: i) Multiple depots, optimizing where to pick-up every order, ii) Allowing vehicles to perform depot returns prior to being empty, thus adapting their routes…
We develop an approach for solving rooted orienteering problems with category constraints as found in tourist trip planning and logistics. It is based on expanding partial solutions in a systematic way, prioritizing promising ones, which…
This article aims to bring quantum computing to robotics. A quantum algorithm is developed to minimize the distance travelled in warehouses and distribution centres where order picking is applied. For this, a proof of concept is proposed…
With the advent of self-driving cars, experts envision autonomous mobility-on-demand services in the near future to cope with overloaded transportation systems in cities worldwide. Efficient operations are imperative to unlock such a…
Last-mile delivery in the logistics chain contributes to emissions and increased congestion. Crowd-shipping is a sustainable and low-cost alternative to traditional delivery, but relies heavily on the availability of occasional couriers. In…
We present a method to apply heuristic search algorithms to solve rearrangement planning by pushing problems. In these problems, a robot must push an object through clutter to achieve a goal. To do this, we exploit the fact that contact…
In modern computer systems, jobs are divided into short tasks and executed in parallel. Empirical observations in practical systems suggest that the task service times are highly random and the job service time is bottlenecked by the…
In \emph{Online Sorting}, an array of $n$ initially empty cells is given. At each time step $t$, an element $x_t \in [0,1]$ arrives and must be placed irrevocably into an empty cell without any knowledge of future arrivals. We aim to…
In \emph{Online Sorting}, an array of $n$ initially empty cells is given. At each time step $t$, an element $x_t \in [0,1]$ arrives and must be placed irrevocably into an empty cell without any knowledge of future arrivals. We aim to…
We consider load balancing in a network of caching servers delivering contents to end users. Randomized load balancing via the so-called power of two choices is a well-known approach in parallel and distributed systems that reduces network…
We present analytic results for warehouse systems involving pairs of carousels. Specifically, for various picking strategies, we show that the sojourn time of the picker satisfies an integral equation that is a contraction mapping. As a…
This paper considers the problem of scheduling a single batch processing machine such that the total number of tardy jobs is minimized. The machine can simultaneously process several jobs as a batch as long as the machine capacity is not…
Localisation and circularity in perishable food supply chains are essential for sustainability. Poor allocation of time-sensitive food leads to waste, higher transport emissions, and unnecessary long-distance sourcing. Algorithms used in…
The online knapsack problem is a classic online resource allocation problem in networking and operations research. Its basic version studies how to pack online arriving items of different sizes and values into a capacity-limited knapsack.…
Packing and vehicle routing problems play an important role in the area of supply chain management. In this paper, we introduce a non-linear knapsack problem that occurs when packing items along a fixed route and taking into account travel…
During the loading phase of a vessel, only the containers that are on top of their stack are directly accessible. If the container that needs to be loaded next is not the top container, extra moves have to be performed, resulting in an…
The Reverse $k$-Nearest Neighbor (R$k$NN) query over moving objects on road networks seeks to find all moving objects that consider the specified query point as one of their $k$ nearest neighbors. In location based services, many users…
In the reordering buffer problem (RBP), a server is asked to process a sequence of requests lying in a metric space. To process a request the server must move to the corresponding point in the metric. The requests can be processed slightly…