A policy of picking up parcels for express courier service in dynamic environments

As a particular logistics service, the express courier service has seen considerable growth recently, which resulted in an unprecedented fierce competition. Besides, the development of information and communication technologies has enabled express company to manage their service. With the purpose of improving service quality and operation efficiency for express company, we focus on the problem of intercity express courier routing in courier-triggered pickup service. A novel pickup policy for courier routing is proposed based on the idea of centrality measures and the nearest-neighbour (NN) policy by considering the un-serviced customer requests as a globally coupled network. This policy enables to dispatch the idle courier to the more central request location, which allows the courier to easily serve the neighbouring requests around the central request location, thus securing both global and local performance. We also propose a simple prototype of real-time fleet management system where the proposed pickup policy is embedded into it. To evaluate the efficiency and practicability of the pickup policy, we conduct comprehensive computational experiments to generate various testing scenarios; moreover, two widely used dispatching policies – NN and first-come-first-served (FCFS) – are considered as the benchmark policy. Results show that the proposed pickup policy significantly outperforms the NN and FCFS policies in terms of waiting time and total service time.