Our paper:

Coordinated Delivery in Urban Retail

Just got published in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. Thanks to the publisher, you can access a free copy for the coming few weeks here. This paper is joint work with the friends from Tsinghua University (Lei Zhao and Ruidian Song) and the Kuhne Logistics University (Jan Fransoo).

In the Coordinated Delivery Problem (CDP), we study two delivery coordination strategies: passive and proactive. We formulate the CDP as mixed integer programs and develop a matheuristic.

Our numerical study shows that, when the stores prefer placing orders based on their own inventory policies, the proactive coordination strategy is able to achieve similar logistics and services performances to Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), while respecting the store order decisions as under Retailer Managed Inventory (RMI), and thus offers an excellent combination of VMI and RMI.