Operational Strategies for On-demand Delivery Services Defended on Thursday, 21 November 2019

On-demand delivery is a special service within the last-mile delivery services, in which customers are expected to receive purchased goods in - or even less than - an hour. Certainly, this service increases customer satisfaction and eventually boosts online shopping sales. However, it also leads to several operational challenges in logistical activities. We focus mainly on the challenge on short lead times making the delivery consolidation almost impossible. As a result, canonical last-mile strategies aiming to attain the economy of scale become obsolete, and consequently, they cannot answer the requirements of these expedited services. This dissertation proposes innovative models designed to utilize existing traffic flows and brick-and-mortar store infrastructures. Numerical experiments demonstrate the viability and merits of these models. The results show that the power of the crowd and effectively integrated retail stores can help on-demand delivery service operators to reduce operational costs.