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SUMMARY:A crowdsourced physical internet for small parcels delivery
DTSTART:20170303T121500
DTEND:20170303T131500
DTSTAMP:20260415T050156Z
UID:af1e171df2310aaa61baddb3ac97747d2d79bfa3fd269fb0a682fc3a
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr Tal Raviv\, Tenured senior Lecturer Industrial Engineering 
 Dept\, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering\, Tel Aviv Univers
 ity\, Israel\nThe rapid growth of e-commerce has caused a significant incr
 ease in the volume that passes through the parcel delivery industry. Recen
 t advances in the mobile computing technology created new opportunities to
  redesign the delivery process to make it more efficient and sustainable. 
 Our idea is to utilize the journeys that regular people are making with th
 eir cars\, to ship small parcels.\nWe envision a novel logistic process fo
 r delivering small parcels by people who subscribe as occasional curriers 
 (OCs). A network of automatic service points (SPs) with lockers is deploye
 d and used as locations where parcels can be dropped off by the senders an
 d picked up by the recipients.  The SPs also serve as intermediate transf
 er points where parcels can be dropped off by OCs and picked up again late
 r by other OCs. Thus\, we use the term physical internet to describe this 
 network. The SPs are strategically located in accessible sites such as gas
  stations.\nThe OCs install a location-aware mobile app that offers them m
 onetary rewards to transfer parcels between the SPs during their regular c
 ar journeys. The parcels can be transferred to their desired destination S
 P or intermediate SPs.\nWe devised a method to route the parcels in the sy
 stem by determining the offers that the system should make to the OCs such
  that the expected operational cost is minimized. This cost consists of th
 e payments to the OCs and penalties that are paid to the customers for lat
 e delivery. The method is based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that so
 lves a simplified version of the problem efficiently.  Next\, we devised 
 a more complex incentive mechanism that allows greater profits for the OCs
  and the operator by reinforcing consolidation of shipments. A heuristic m
 ethod to resolve this mechanism is proposed. The method combines the polic
 y obtained from the simplified MDP with local solutions of loading optimiz
 ation problems that are formulated and solved as a mixed integer program.
  \nWe conducted a simulation study using realistic data on the movement o
 f people and parcels. Our preliminary results demonstrate that such a syst
 em can provide next day delivery service at a very low operational cost. T
 he system can handle a large volume of parcel traffic by utilizing the exc
 ess capacity of private cars in a small fraction of the journeys that the 
 public is doing anyway. The ratio between the rewards paid to the OCs and 
 our conservative estimate of the time needed to handle the parcels is well
  above the average hourly wage while the average cost of delivering a parc
 el is significantly below the market price of this service.\n \nJoint wor
 k with Eyal Tenzer\n\nShort Bio : Tal Raviv is a tenured senior lecturer I
 ndustrial Engineering department at the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty 
 of Engineering\, Tel Aviv University\, Israel. He holds a BA from the Eita
 n Berglas School of Economics\, Tel Aviv University (1993)\, an MBA from t
 he Recanati School of Business\, Tel Aviv University (1997)\, and a PhD in
  Operations Research from the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engin
 eering and Management\, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology\, Haifa 
 (2003). He spent two years (2004-2006) as a postdoctoral fellow in the Sau
 der School of Business at University of British Columbia\, Vancouver\, Can
 ada. His current primary research interest is in transportation and logist
 ics with a focus on shared mobility systems and sustainable logistics.
LOCATION:GCB330 http://plan.epfl.ch/?lang=fr&room=GCB330
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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