Demand Management in E-fulfillment
Doctoral Thesis by Niels Agatz, 2009
This thesis is about the way the home delivery company Albert.nl has organised their booking website in such a way that the customer helps Albert.nl optimize their delivery plan. Their approach is to evaluate the value of delivery slots in terms of how well they fit in the current routing of delivery trucks. Slots that fit very well (because they represent a delivery address close to an already booked delivery address) are cheap, and slots that do not fit so well are expensive. Very ill-fitting slots can be removed from the site altogether, so that customers cannot choose them at all.
This mechanism (demand driven optimization) is also used in a terminal in the Port of Rotterdam. Slot booking of pick up and delivery of goods results in a flatter arrival pattern and less congestion at the terminal gate.
But the applicability in the port area can go further. If customers can be induced, with the right selection of options and information, to make certain choices, a booking platform for hinterland transport may also be able to facilitate multimodal transport by offering transport options across modes in the same screen to a planner or transport coordinator. This may require some further research and innovative solutions to equalize the operational booking process of inland shipping, rail and truck transport, but that is why Erasmus Smart Port exists. These suggestions have already been made in the Pieken in de Delta Project Fresh Corridor.
