Network design for time‐constrained delivery |
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Authors: | Hui Chen Ann Melissa Campbell Barrett W. Thomas |
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Affiliation: | Department of Management Sciences, Tippie College of Business, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242 |
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Abstract: | To meet customer demand, delivery companies are offering an increasing number of time‐definite services. In this article, we examine the strategic design of delivery networks which can efficiently provide these services. Because of the high cost of direct connections, we focus on tree‐structured networks. As it may not be possible to identify a tree‐structured network that satisfies all of the delivery guarantees, we allow these guarantees to be violated but seek to minimize the sum of the violations. We establish the complexity of the problem and exploit an empirically identified solution structure to create new neighborhoods which improve solution values over more general neighborhood structures. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008 |
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Keywords: | network design tree‐structure networks local search time constraints |
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