Deep Q-Learning for Same-Day Delivery with a Heterogeneous Fleet of Vehicles and Drones

10/25/2019
by   Xinwei Chen, et al.
0

In this paper, we consider same-day delivery with a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles and drones. Customers make delivery requests over the course of the day and the dispatcher dynamically dispatches vehicles and drones to deliver the goods to customers before their delivery deadline. Vehicles can deliver multiple packages in one route but travel relatively slowly due to the urban traffic. Drones travel faster, but they have limited capacity and require charging or battery swaps. To exploit the different strengths of the fleets, we propose a deep Q-learning approach. Our method learns the value of assigning a new customer to either drones or vehicles as well as the option to not offer service at all. To aid feature selection, we present an analytical analysis that demonstrates the role that different types of information have on the value function and decision making. In a systematic computational analysis, we show the superiority of our policy compared to benchmark policies and the effectiveness of our deep Q-learning approach.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
04/24/2021

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Meal Delivery Problem

We consider a meal delivery service fulfilling dynamic customer requests...
research
09/13/2021

A Scalable Last-Mile Delivery Service: From Simulation to Scaled Experiment

In this paper, we investigate the problem of a last-mile delivery servic...
research
11/14/2019

PFaRA: a Platoon Forming and Routing Algorithm for Same-Day Deliveries

Platoons, vehicles that travel very close together acting as one, promis...
research
01/06/2023

Evolutionary Carrier Selection for Shared Truck Delivery Services

With multiple carriers in a logistics market, customers can choose the b...
research
12/30/2022

E-commerce users' preferences for delivery options

Many e-commerce marketplaces offer their users fast delivery options for...
research
07/19/2020

Same-Day Delivery with Fairness

The demand for same-day delivery (SDD) has increased rapidly in the last...
research
09/11/2020

Limousine Service Management: Capacity Planning with Predictive Analytics and Optimization

The limousine service in luxury hotels is an integral component of the w...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset