Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Operational Strategies for on-demand personal shopper services
AU - Arslan, Alp
AU - Agatz, Niels
AU - Klapp, Matthias A.
PY - 2021/9/30
Y1 - 2021/9/30
N2 - Inspired by recent innovations in the retail industry, we study an on-demand personal shopper service that lets customers shop online for products from brick and mortar stores. A fleet of personal shoppers fulfills customer orders, performing both shopping at the stores and delivery to the customers. The operation of such a service requires to dynamically offer service to incoming shopping and delivery requests, coordinate a fleet of shoppers, schedule shopping operations at stores, and execute deliveries to customers on time. This paper studies this new problem and proposes three different order-consolidation strategies for service operators. Our numerical results show that order consolidation, particularly shopping consolidation, can significantly increase the number of served orders by better using the available shopper capacity. We observe that splitting orders can further enhance the performance of the system. The results also suggest that personal shopper services increase time utilization and execute shopping activities using significantly less human resources than customers shopping for themselves.
AB - Inspired by recent innovations in the retail industry, we study an on-demand personal shopper service that lets customers shop online for products from brick and mortar stores. A fleet of personal shoppers fulfills customer orders, performing both shopping at the stores and delivery to the customers. The operation of such a service requires to dynamically offer service to incoming shopping and delivery requests, coordinate a fleet of shoppers, schedule shopping operations at stores, and execute deliveries to customers on time. This paper studies this new problem and proposes three different order-consolidation strategies for service operators. Our numerical results show that order consolidation, particularly shopping consolidation, can significantly increase the number of served orders by better using the available shopper capacity. We observe that splitting orders can further enhance the performance of the system. The results also suggest that personal shopper services increase time utilization and execute shopping activities using significantly less human resources than customers shopping for themselves.
KW - On-demand delivery
KW - Personal shopper
KW - Pickup and delivery
KW - Consolidation
KW - Routing
UR - https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3428912
U2 - 10.1016/j.trc.2021.103320
DO - 10.1016/j.trc.2021.103320
M3 - Journal article
VL - 130
JO - Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
JF - Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
SN - 1556-5068
M1 - 103320
ER -