Optimizing Attended Home Delivery: Multiple recovery options and customer availability profiles to face synchronization failures

Abstract

In the growing sector of Attended Home Delivery, unsynchronized deliveries between couriers and recipients affect both customers’ satisfaction and companies’ costs. Hence, reducing such failures improves companies’ service quality and logistics efficiency. To address this issue, we study an Attended Home Delivery Problem with Recovery Options (AHDPRO) in which customers specify their probability of being at home during different timeslots of the day and their preferred recovery option in case of a synchronization failure. The options include leaving the package in a predefined safe location, bringing it to a generic collection point, or scheduling a second delivery attempt. Each alternative involves different costs and, in most cases, additional operational decisions. The AHDPRO aims to complete all customer deliveries while minimizing overall routing times as well as the overall penalty due to the recovery actions implemented and weighted by the probability of a synchronization failure to occur. We propose a branch-and-cut algorithm, including valid inequalities and heuristic procedures, to solve a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming model based on an expanded graph. Using the developed method as a tool for evaluating costs and operations, we conduct an experimental campaign on scenarios adapted from the literature involving lexicographic-based optimization procedures able to address the multiple attributes of the solutions. The results obtained allow us to assess the impact of the different recovery options on the optimal solutions and their values. Additionally, the results yield several managerial insights for companies operating in the Attended Home Delivery sector, such as the timeslot length, perceived service quality, and other key operational factors contributing to efficient planning and improved customer satisfaction.