International Journal of Production Research

ISSN: 0020-7543 (Print) 1366-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tprs20

A policy of picking up parcels for express courier

service in dynamic environments

Xian Cheng, Shaoyi Liao & Zhongsheng Hua

To cite this article: Xian Cheng, Shaoyi Liao & Zhongsheng Hua (2016): A policy of picking
up parcels for express courier service in dynamic environments, International Journal of
Production Research, DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2016.1231431

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2016.1231431

Published online: 16 Sep 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tprs20

Download by: [Northern Illinois University] Date: 17 September 2016, At: 06:01
International Journal of Production Research, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2016.1231431

A policy of picking up parcels for express courier service in dynamic environments

Xian Chenga*, Shaoyi Liaob and Zhongsheng Huaa
a
School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; bDepartment of Information Systems, City
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
(Received 5 August 2015; accepted 20 August 2016)

As a particular logistics service, the express courier service has seen considerable growth recently, which resulted in an
unprecedented fierce competition. Besides, the development of information and communication technologies has enabled
express company to manage their service. With the purpose of improving service quality and operation efficiency for
express company, we focus on the problem of intercity express courier routing in courier-triggered pickup service. A
novel pickup policy for courier routing is proposed based on the idea of centrality measures and the nearest-neighbour
(NN) policy by considering the un-serviced customer requests as a globally coupled network. This policy enables to
dispatch the idle courier to the more central request location, which allows the courier to easily serve the neighbouring
requests around the central request location, thus securing both global and local performance. We also propose a simple
prototype of real-time fleet management system where the proposed pickup policy is embedded into it. To evaluate the
efficiency and practicability of the pickup policy, we conduct comprehensive computational experiments to generate
various testing scenarios; moreover, two widely used dispatching policies – NN and first-come-first-served (FCFS) – are
considered as the benchmark policy. Results show that the proposed pickup policy significantly outperforms the NN and
FCFS policies in terms of waiting time and total service time.
Keywords: express courier service; pickup process; dynamic routing; network analysis; centrality measures; dispatching
policy

1. Introduction
Express courier service pertains to the provision of value-added, door-to-door transport and next-day (or time-definite,
usually several days) delivery of shipments, such as documents, parcels and merchandise goods (henceforth, parcels for
short) (Forecasting 2005). Recently, there has been a growth in the shipment of individual parcels as the development
of diversification of commercial mode, such as business-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and
e-commerce. So the demand for express courier service has risen over time. Taking China, for example, according to
the State Post Bureau of China, the annual growth rate of express business volume has been maintained at higher
than 50% for four consecutive years since 2011, and the business volume of express courier service has grown from
1.5 billion in 2008 to 13.96 billion in 2014 (http://www.spb.gov.cn/) (see Figure 1 for detailed information). Moreover,
the intensified competition between express companies is unprecedented. As of 2013, approximately 8000 express com-
panies exist in China. In addition, labour cost is rising dramatically. With these considerations, the express company has
to invite new and efficient technique (e.g. information and communication technologies) for managing express courier
service operations with the aim of gaining competence in the industry, sustaining high-quality service, reducing opera-
tion cost and keeping and attracting more customers.
For next-day or time-definite express courier service, parcels have to be handled and often be transported in large
distances (from one city to another city) in order to be delivered on time. We denote this kind of service as intercity
express courier service.1 Figure 2 shows the typical process of intercity express courier service in which several opera-
tions are included. Following the flow of parcels, these operations can be divided into three subprocesses, namely
pickup, sorting and delivery. In pickup process, the courier service occurs in the place where the parcels originated, the
couriers pick up the parcels at the customer locations after receiving the customer requests, the parcels are consolidated
into conveyance (usually electric bikes or motorcycles) and transferred to the local station. In sorting process, parcels
are sorted at location station based on their destinations, volume and other factors, parcels are then moved to a major
regional sorting facility called ramp or hub for further sorting, usually by truck. Finally, during delivery process, parcels

*Corresponding author. Email: chengcx@mail.ustc.edu.cn

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 X. Cheng et al.

Figure 1. The situation of express industry in China.

Figure 2. The intercity express courier service process. Here we highlight the pickup process.

are firstly delivered to the destination ramp by aeroplanes or trains, then to the destination location by truck and ulti-
mately to the end customer by electric bikes or motorcycles. Couriers routing are needed in both pickup and delivery
processes. However, compared with the delivery process, there are more challenges during the pickup process, such as
new customer requests arriving, uncertain service demand, we will describe these challenges in detail in subsection 1.1;
besides, in pickup process the couriers have to meet customers, express company has to pay much attention to improve
the service quality, in order to keep and attract more customers. Motivated by these considerations, we mainly focus on
the pickup process in this paper with the objectives of improving service quality and operation efficiency for express
company.
Two measures can be used to evaluate the express company’s service quality and operation efficiency in the pickup
process. One is customer waiting time, which is defined as the time taken by a courier dispatched to serve the customer
after a request is arrived. Customer waiting time reflects the service quality of pickup for an express company because a
short waiting time denotes a short response time for the company, and further reflects its agility. The other measure is
the total time to serve a set of customer requests, which can be used to evaluate the operation efficiency as spending a
small amount of time to serve a certain request reflects a high operation efficiency. The fleet managers of express com-
pany should formulate a pickup policy that focuses on the manner of dispatching couriers to serve customer requests to
reduce customer waiting time and the total service time. In general, there are two types of decisions for fleet managers
in pickup process: request-triggered decision and courier-triggered decision. When a new customer request arrives and
several couriers are idle, the request triggers a decision of selecting an appropriate courier to serve this request
(request-triggered). On the other hand, if requests can’t be served immediately and should be queued, and a courier who
has just been idle from picking up has to select a request from the waiting queue, a courier-dispatching decision
(courier-triggered) is triggered. The request-triggered decision is more relevant in routine situation where the extent of
busyness of the service district is relatively low, e.g. the suburban district, in request-triggered scenario the customer
 International Journal of Production Research 3

requests are served easily during the projected service time as idle couriers are always available. Conversely, in the
condition where the extent of busyness is high, the courier-triggered decisions come into play. This scenario often
occurs in central business districts of a city where the demand of pickup service is always high. The courier-triggered
decisions can also be occurred during the promotion activity for e-commerce platforms, e.g. the promotion of Chinese
Singles Day at Taobao.com, or the Cyber Monday in United States. The demand of shipment of individual parcels
emerges in large numbers during the promotion activity. Compared with request-triggered decision, the courier-triggered
decision challenges the fleet managers as this type of decision is often associated with the effort of minimising response
time to meet the projected service time as the customer request has to be queued, the fleet managers have to adopt
effective pickup policy to serve customer requests. Motivated by this situation, here we consider the situation of cour-
ier-triggered decision in pickup process.

1.1 Problem description

In the courier-triggered pickup process of express courier service, a set of dynamic requests has to be served by a fleet
of vehicles (electric bikes or motorcycles) where each vehicle has one courier; a fleet of vehicle serves a small geo-
graphical district (e.g. a university) and vehicle are considered to be homogeneous with regard to loading capacity. As
the mobility and accessibility of electric bikes or motorcycles, the fleet manager doesn’t need to consider the traffic con-
gestion problem during the pickup process. Moreover, each customer request consists of parcels which need to be trans-
ported from request location in a projected service time window that does not allow for an express courier to arrive
after the latest time to start the pickup service. Furthermore, the capacity constraint of vehicles is needed to consider
during the pickup process because of the small size of electric bikes or motorcycles. The key characteristic for the cour-
ier-triggered pickup in express service is the time-sensitive service, which calls for on-time and quick-response customer
service. However, several difficulties pose the challenge of the pickup service.
(1) the dynamically arriving of new customer requests. New requests frequently occur after the couriers have been
dispatched to pick up, consequently, these new requests may interrupt the execution of the pre-determined cour-
ier routing schedule, resulting in increased operations cost and delayed customer service (Lin, Choy, et al.
2014). Under this situation, one concern for fleet managers is that how to design a real-time control policy that
handles the schedule execution and schedule adaptation.
(2) the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands. At most time, the courier only knows that there are
parcels need to be picked up at the request location; however, he doesn’t know the volume and quantity of the
parcels before he served the request. As the parcels possess a specific space of the vehicle and the maximum
capacity of vehicle is fixed, the courier has to go back the local station immediately when the vehicle is filled
with parcels. Furthermore, customer demands on express courier service may also be uncertain. For example, if
the parcel is emergency and needed to delivery to the destination in a very short time, the customer will require
the courier immediately transfer the parcels to the local location; another example is that the parcels are some
fragile products or fresh fruits which are also needed to be transfer to the location station for special handling,
e.g. cold storage. All the information about parcel and customer demands for a request is known until that the
pickup service is fulfilled. So the courier should decide whether need to go back to the local station once a ful-
filment of a picking up. Consequently, the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands, which also can
interrupt the execution of the courier routing schedule, is also needed to be considered in the pickup policy.
Obviously, it is hard to tackle the above-mentioned challenges for courier routing problem in pickup process, even
for an experienced fleet manager. However, thanks to the advances in information and communication technologies,
real-time information, such as new requests, which is available during the execution of courier routing schedule can
now be utilised (Giaglis, Minis, et al. 2004). Based on real-time information, it is feasible to formulate a real-time cour-
ier routing policy which is integrated into a prototype of fleet management information system to cope with the above-
mentioned challenges. So in this paper, the considered intercity express courier routing problem is defined as designing
suitable pickup policy in terms of reducing both customer waiting time and total service time in the courier-triggered
pickup service for fleet managers who need to consider the dynamically arriving of new customer requests and the
uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands.

1.2 Contribution
As characterised by: (1), dynamic changing of the courier routing schedule as the real-time information of new requests
arriving; and (2), considering the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands, the considered courier routing
4 X. Cheng et al.

problem is distinct from the traditional vehicle routing problems (VRPs) (Tsai, Tsai, et al. 2003; Pillac, Gendreau, et al.
2013). Indeed, the arrival of new request is considered in the dynamic VRPs (Yan, Lin, et al. 2013; Ferrucci and Bock
2014; Lin, Choy, et al. 2014). However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the uncertainty of parcels and customer
service demands has not been previously explored in the literature.
In this paper, we propose a novel pickup policy for real-time courier routing in an effort to help fleet managers make
effective decisions in reducing customer waiting time and total service time, and based on this pickup policy, we
develop a simple prototype of real-time fleet management information system. In detail, concentrating on the courier-
triggered decision situations in which many requests are queued, the proposed pickup policy considers these un-serviced
requests as a globally coupled network according to the request’s geographical location. It is a dynamic network because
of the arriving of new requests and removing of serviced requests. And then the centrality measures, which are adopted
from network science (Friedkin 1991; Leem and Chun 2014), are used to measure the centrality of the un-serviced
requests. The centrality measures prioritise the un-serviced requests based on the centrality of requests as it evaluates
the efficiency of a request in reaching to other requests. However, if we dispatch the courier merely by the centrality
measures, the courier may always excessively move to the most central requests thus would ignore to serve the neigh-
bouring requests, potentially leading to waste the travelling time. In order to deal with this problem, we integrate the
nearest-neighbour (NN) policy into centrality measure. The NN policy, which is widely used in traditional VRPs
(Egbelu and Tanchoco 1984; Bertsimas and van Ryzin 1991; Mantel and Landeweerd 1995; Dean 2008), is defined as
dispatching a courier to the closest request, thus the NN policy has the capacity of pursuing the local performance.
Based on the integration of the centrality measures and the NN policy, the proposed pickup policy enables to dispatch
the idle courier to the more central request location, which allows the courier to easily serve the neighbouring requests
around the central request location, thus securing both global and local performance. The main contributions of this
paper are as follows:
(1) we construct a dynamic globally coupled network of queued requests which enables us to measure the centrality
of those requests. The centrality measure provides a global view of request distribution and thus secures the glo-
bal performance. At the same time, in order to pursue the local performance, we also integrate the NN policy
into the proposed pickup policy, as the NN policy always tries to minimise the current travel time. Moreover,
the new arriving requests are added into the globally coupled network and served requests are removed from it,
so the dynamic globally coupled network integrates the real-time information.
(2) we develop a probability model to cope with the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands. As we
mentioned, the uncertainty of volume and quantity of the parcels and the uncertainty of customer service
demands determines the possibility that the courier goes back to local station to place the parcels, once he fin-
ished serving a current request. These uncertainty events exhibit a stochastic nature, thus can be model based on
a probability of going back to local station for a courier once he finished serving the current request. Indeed, it
is not necessary for a courier to always go back to the local location for each pickup service. However, once the
vehicle is filled with parcels, or the courier encounters special customer service or special parcel (e.g. fragile
products, fresh fruits), he has to go back to the local location. So the probability model is well suited to model
these stochastic events.
(3) we propose a simple prototype of real-time fleet management system in which the proposed pickup policy is
embedded. There are two main modules in this fleet management system: data processing module and dynamic
routing module. As the dynamically arriving of new customer requests, the data processing module is used to
construct the globally coupled network by recording the location for new requests and the courier current loca-
tion, and removing the location for served requests. And then the globally coupled network is considered as the
input of the dynamic routing module in which the proposed pickup policy is integrated. Based on this policy,
the suitable dispatch information is obtained and then sent to idle courier by a real-time data receiver.
(4) we design various test scenarios to evaluate the efficiency and practicability of the proposed pickup policy by
compared with two widely used dispatching policies – the NN policy and the first-come-first-served (FCFS)
policy (Chen 1999; Kuo 2013).

1.3 Organisation
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the related work. Section 3 describes the
proposed pickup policy and proposes simple prototype of real-time fleet management system. Section 4 performs the
computational experiments and analyses the results. Section 5 summarises the paper and presents the direction for future
work.
 International Journal of Production Research 5

2. Related literature
Due to the challenges as mentioned in former section, the considered problem – intercity express courier routing in cour-
ier-triggered pickup service – has not been previously studied in the literature. However, ignoring the probability of going
back to the local station, this problem has been considered as the VRP (Coelho and Laporte 2013; Yousefikhoshbakht,
Didehvar, et al. 2014; Mavrovouniotis and Yang 2015). Besides, the centrality measures are adopted in the proposed
pickup policy. So this section we focus on the related literature of VRP (especially the dynamic VRP) and the centrality
measures.

2.1 Vehicle routing problem

Since it was first introduced by Dantzig and Ramser (1959), VRP, which is a NP-hard problem, has been received
extensive research attention. Depending on the availability of data and information at the beginning of routing, VRP can
be classified as either static or dynamic. A large number of literature focus on approaches for static VRP which deals
with the deterministic operational environment by assuming that the data and information are known in advance with
certainty (Bard and Jarrah 2009; Yousefikhoshbakht, Didehvar, et al. 2014), there is no routing schedule adaptation dur-
ing the execution of the transportation service on account of the absence of dynamic events. However, in contrast,
dynamic VRP handle unexpected changes of the system situation as the circumstances in the real world are not always
deterministic and static, such as the dynamic arriving of new requests (Ghiani, Manni, et al. 2009; Bock 2010); traffic
congestions(Cortés, Núñez, et al. 2008) and vehicles disturbances (Li, Mirchandani, et al. 2009). For detailed review
literature on the dynamic VRP, please refer to Pillac, Gendreau, et al. (2013) and Larsen, Madsen, et al. (2008).
In similarity with us, there are several literature which particularly focus on vehicle routing in express industry. We
compared these related literature based on service type, real-time situation and objective, and the results are shown in
Table 1. In the literature of Sungur, Ren, et al. (2010); Chang and Yen (2012) and Ferrucci and Bock (2014), the
authors take into account the whole pickup and delivery process, as the one-day (or same-day) express service almost
has no sorting process and always occurs in a same city – intra-city express courier service. However, due to the sev-
eral-days (or overnight) express service contains the pickup process in one city and the delivery process in another city,
the literature of Lin, Yan, et al. (2013), Yan, Lin, et al. (2013) and Lin, Choy, et al. (2014) merely focus on pickup pro-
cess. Besides, many real-time situations are considered in these literature in this table, such as stochastic travel time,
new requests and traffic congestion. However, the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands, which is men-
tioned in the former section, has not been studied in these literature. So we consider these uncertainties in this paper,
which makes our work distinct from these related literature.
On the other hand, thanks to the advances in information and communication technology (ICT), many real-time
information can be handled in the field of vehicle routing, such as changing in customer requests, the dynamic
transportation networks as urgent traffic control or congestion. Fleet management systems which cope with the dynamic
vehicle routing module have drawn the attention of both academia and industry, as the facilitating of state of the art of
ICT. This dynamic fleet management system is able to get access to the remote and real-time situations which reflect
the real-world complexity, and thus can provide timely and reliable routing decisions. In the paper of Pillac,

Table 1. Comparison of related literature on express courier service.

Paper Service type Real-time situation Objective

Sungur, Ren, et al. One-day service; pickup No real-time situation Maximising customer coverage;
(2010) and delivery minimising total time
Chang and Yen One-day service; pickup No real-time situation Minimising total time; minimising
(2012) and delivery unbalanced workload
Lin, Yan, et al. Several-days service; Stochastic travel time Minimising operating costs
(2013) pickup
Yan, Lin, et al. Several-days service; Stochastic travel time; New requests; Minimising operating costs
(2013) pickup
Lin, Choy, et al. Several-days service; New requests; Requests cancellations Minimisng total travel distance
(2014) pickup
Ferrucci and Bock One-day service; pickup New requests; traffic congestion; Minimisng lateness; minimising vehicle
(2014) and delivery Vehicle disturbance operating costs
6 X. Cheng et al.

Guéret, et al. (2012), the authors design a Java event-driven framework which focuses on the highly flexible online opti-
misation in dynamic operating environments. Concentrating on the public logistics information service management and
optimisation, Hu and Sheng proposes a decision support system (DSS) for fleet management (Hu and Sheng 2014). This
DSS employs the intelligent positioning technologies to acquire and manage the vehicle status. In the field of express
courier service, Lin and his co-authors develop a DSS to deal with real-time customer requests (including new customer
orders and order cancellations) by integrating with the dynamic courier routing model (Lin, Choy, et al. 2014). Many
other real fleet management systems are also published in the literature, such as Ninikas, Athanasopoulos, et al. (2014),
Barceló, Grzybowska, et al. (2007) and Crainic, Gendreau, et al. (2009). Following this fashion, here we also propose a
prototype of real-time fleet management system in which the proposed pickup policy is embedded.

2.2 Centrality measures

Network analysis, which has greatly evolved in the twenty-first century, is a leading field in the study of systems which
affects every aspect of our daily life. It can be used in many fields, such as social network (Gloor, Paasivaara, et al.
2008; Durugbo and Riedel 2013), enterprise network (Hu, Zhao, et al. 2012; Mezgár and Rauschecker 2014) and supply
chain network (Bezuidenhout, Bodhanya, et al. 2012; Ravindran, Susarla, et al. 2015). There are a large number of theo-
retical or methodologies analytical tools which are used to study network. One important concept is centrality measures.
Centrality measures, which refer to a series of indices used to localise the most significant nodes and to quantify their
importance in relation to other nodes in a network, have been discussed for more than 50 years. A large number of
centrality types have been proposed, such as degree centrality (Kiss and Bichler 2008), closeness centrality (Kiss and
Bichler 2008), betweenness centrality (Durugbo 2013) and eigenvector centrality (Ruhnau 2000). As the capacity of pro-
viding a global perspective for the network structure, these centrality measures are applied in many fields, including
optimisation problems (Freeman, Borgatti, et al. 1991; Gómez, Figueira, et al. 2013), complex engineered systems
(Sosa, Mihm, et al. 2011), complex product development (Batallas and Yassine 2006; Sosa, Eppinger, et al. 2007), urban
management (Crucitti, Latora, et al. 2006) and service organisations (Urrutiaguer 2004; Bendle and Patterson 2010).
In particular, the centrality measures have been used in emergence medical service (Lee 2012a, 2000b) to measure
the density of calls based on the ideas of preparedness. The idea of preparedness is proposed by Andersson and Vär-
brand (2007), in this literature the service area is divided into zones and a preparedness level is given to each zone for
use in making decisions in emergence medical service. Following this idea, we adopt centrality measures to evaluate the
preparedness level of the un-served request in express courier service.

3. Real-time courier routing for picking up

In this section, we first model the considered problem – intercity express courier routing in courier-triggered pickup ser-
vice. Based on the modelling, we propose a novel pickup policy which combines the concepts of centrality measures
and NN pickup policy. At last we develop a prototype of real-time fleet management system which enables to help the
fleet manager to dynamically dispatch the express courier.

3.1 Modelling the problem

As we mainly focus on the scenario of courier-triggered decision in pickup process, this real-time courier routing
problem can be characterised as follow:
(1) the customer requests dynamically arrive and each request needs an express courier service for picking up
parcels at the request location;
(2) the express company promises a maximum waiting time for the customer and the parcels should be picked up
no later than the maximum waiting time in order to maintain a high level of service;
(3) after the fulfilment of picking up, the courier should go back to the local location with a probability as the
consideration of the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands;
(4) at most time requests cannot be served immediately and should be queued, a request from the waiting queue is
selected to be served by the courier who has just been idle;
(5) the courier never know the routing schedule, and the location for serving the next customer is informed only
when the courier has completed serving the previous request;
(6) the objectives are reducing the customer waiting time and total service time, simultaneously.
 International Journal of Production Research 7

3.2 The proposed pickup policy

The un-served requests in the waiting queue can be modelled as a globally coupled network G ¼ ðV ; EÞ, where V is
the set of all nodes which denote the un-served requests, and E is the set of all edges between each two nodes, each
edge is associated with a travelling distance d ij which denote the distance between two requests, we can calculate the
travelling time t ij based on the distance. Considering the maximum desired waiting time T max , the acceptable projected
service time windows for the request i is the interval of [t i , t i þ T max ], where t i means the arriving time for request i.
The nodes’ centrality value can be obtained based on this globally coupled network, it is adopted to guide dispatch-
ing courier in the dynamic situation. If an idle courier is dispatched to the most central request, this location for central
requests can be considered as the central point of the densest zone in the service area, this courier has the opportunity
to serve other requests in that zone at a maximum rate of completion. However, if the idle courier is dispatched only by
the centrality value, the courier excessively pursues to serve the more central requests without enough exploitation of
un-served requests in vicinity. This shortcoming can be overcome by integrating the NN policy into centrality measures,
given that NN policy is capable of exploring the neighbouring un-serviced requests. That is, the pickup policy prioritises
the requests by centrality measure and NN policy, which ensure both the global and local performance for pickup pro-
cess. Along with an illustrative example (refer to Figure 3), the proposed pickup policy is described in detail as follows.
All the variables and parameters are summarised in Table 2.
Step 1: When a courier (denoted as a) is idle, the un-serviced requests, represented as a set of V, are identified.
In Figure 3(A), there are two couriers: the busy courier b is dispatched to serve request u9; the couriers a is idle.
There are eight un-served requests, so V ¼ fu1 ; u2 ; . . .; u8 g. For further work, we assume that the travel time for each
edge is 1 min in Figure 3(A).
Step 2: Constructing the globally coupled network and computing the centrality measures for each un-serviced
request based on Equation (1).2

!w
X 1
ci ¼ (1)
j2V ;j6¼i
1 þ t ij

where w is a control parameter, is used to control the weight of centrality measure.

(A) (B)

(D)
(C)

Figure 3. The illustration example for the proposed pickup policy.

8 X. Cheng et al.

Table 2. Notation of the variables and parameters.

G Globally coupled network

V Set of nodes (un-served customer requests)
E Set of edges among nodes
a Courier
dij The distance between i and j, i, j ∈ V
T max Maximum desired waiting time
Ti Current waiting time for request i, i ∈ V
tij Travelling time between request i and j, i; j 2 V
ti Arriving time for request i, i 2 V
t ai Travelling time for courier a reaching to request i, i 2 V
ci Centrality measure for request i, i 2 V
f ai The fitness value for courier a reaching to request i, i; 2 V
w Control parameter
Back Prob The probability of going back

A globally coupled network is shown in Figure 3(B). Here we set the parameter w as 2. So, the centrality for each
un-served request is calculated.
 The results are 2 shown in the second row in Figure 3(C). Taking u1 as an example,
c1 ¼ 7:29 ¼ ð2:7Þ2 ¼ 12 þ 13 þ 12 þ 12 þ 13 þ 13 þ 15 .
Step 3: Computing for the travelling time t ai , which denotes the time for an idle courier a reaching an un-serviced
request i.
The travelling time for courier a to each un-served request is shown in the third row in Figure 3(C).
Step 4: Identifying the current waiting time for each un-served request, which is denoted as Ti (at most time the T i
cannot exceed T max ).
In the illustrative example, we assume that the current waiting time for each un-served request is not exceeded the
half of the maximum waiting time, so T i  T max
2 .

Step 5: Computing the Fitness f ai based on Equation (2).

(   )
ci
; 0 \ T i  T max
f ai ¼ 1þt ai Tmax 2  (2)
ci
1þt ai þ T maxT T
i
i
; 2 \ T i \ T max

The fitness of the eight un-served requests is shown in the fourth row of Figure 3(C).
Step 6: Dispatching the idle courier a to the request i  that maximise the fitness of f ai .

i  ¼ arg max f ai (3)

i2V

In Figure 3(D), the idle courier a is dispatched to either u4 or u5, due to the fitness for these two requests are the high-
est among the eight un-served requests.
In the illustrative example, it is worth to highlight that the NN policy dispatches the courier a to serve request u8
due to the courier is the closest to the request u8, whereas the proposed pickup policy dispatches the courier a to request
u4 (or u5). Indeed, the current travelling time to u4 (or u5) is larger than the travelling time to u8; however, the courier
a can serve more quickly to the requests nearby the u4 (or u5), e.g. u1, u3 and u6, after it finishes serving the request u4
(or u5).
We label the proposed pickup policy as centrality-related policy. Steps 1 to 5 is repeated once any courier is idle,
and the whole process ends when all un-serviced requests have been addressed. Besides, as mentioned earlier, the
courier may go back to the local station once he finished serving the current request as the uncertainty of parcels and
customer service demands. Here we adopt the probability concept to model the uncertainty, which means that the
courier will go back to the local location at a certain probability once he finished serving the current request. The
probability of going back to the local station is denoted as Back Prob.
 International Journal of Production Research 9

Figure 4. The framework of the real-time fleet management system.

3.3 A prototype of real time fleet management system

Employing the advanced ICT, we developed a simple prototype of real-time fleet management system, in which the pro-
posed pickup policy is embedded. Figure 4 shows the framework of this system. Excepting the requests receiver centre,
two main modules – data processing module and dynamic routing module – compose the real-time fleet management
system. The data processing module records and sorts the request and courier location at beginning time, such as the
location of new requests, old un-served requests and served requests; moreover, a global coupled network is formed
based on the location of un-serviced requests. The dynamic routing module is responsible for helping the fleet manager
to dynamically dispatch the express courier for picking up parcels according to the centrality-based policy (CP). The
dispatching work is triggered once any courier is idled, so the location for serving the next customer request is informed
only when the courier has finished serving the previous request. In detail, when any courier finish serving the previous
request, the global coupled network is updated by inserting the new customer requests into and removing the served
requests, and then the CP is performed and a suitable dispatching schedule is obtained, and this schedule is sent to the
idle courier based on real-time data receiver. According to these descriptions, the prototype can achieve the real-time
routing for picking up parcels.

4. Computational experiments
In this section, we examine the performance of the proposed pickup policy for dispatching courier in various scenarios
by conducting computational experiments. The effect of this pickup policy is compared with two benchmark policies –
the NN and FCFS policies.

4.1 Two benchmark policies

For VRP, two dispatching policies are widely used. They are the NN and FCFS policies. The FCFS policy focuses on
dispatching the idle courier to the location of the first coming request. This policy is appropriate for request-triggered
situation where the system is not busy and the number of the non-served requests is small, but may not be suitable for
courier-triggered situation where a large number of requests are waiting for service. The NN policy is dispatching the
idle courier to the closest request location, which focuses on minimising the current response time for serving request.
Owing to computational efficiency and its capacity to reach a certain level of effectiveness, the greedy NN policy is
widely used in various applications, such as emergency medical service (Chaiken and Larson 1972; Alanis, Ingolfsson,
et al. 2013; Lee 2014), task allocation (Ostergaard and Mataric 2001; Gerkey and Mataric 2002) and routing problem
10 X. Cheng et al.

(Bertsimas and van Ryzin 1991; de Koster, Le-Anh, et al. 2004). However, although the NN policy enables to minimise
the waiting time for the current request, the waiting time for the next request may be prolonged owing to the short-
sightedness of this policy. Both policies are considered as the benchmark policies in this paper.

4.2 Experiment design

In an express company, the couriers are usually divided into groups, and each group is assigned to serve a particular
small area in a city. In this study, the service area is represented as a 9 × 9 square grid, as shown in Figure 5. The
requests are generated at every vertex with a probability in this square grid, and the courier move from vertex to vertex
though the edges with 1-min travel time. When a courier is dispatched to serve a request, the service time to the request
is an exponential distribution with average service time (the mean of the exponential distribution) of 0.5 min. A total of
N = 10,000 requests are generated at a rate of one request per minute; this request series is also an exponential distribu-
tion. The requests are randomly distributed to the vertices of this square grid. As mentioned earlier, the courier would
transfer the parcels to the local station immediately once he finished serving the current request as the uncertainty of
parcels and customer service demands. Here we adopt the probability concept to model the consideration, and the
probability of transferring to the local station is denoted as Back Prob. The purpose of this experiment is to evaluate
the performance of the proposed pickup policy as compared with two other widely used policies (NN and FCFS) under
the situation of courier-triggered decision.

Figure 5. Customer requests arriving patterns. The red vertex denotes the local station.
 International Journal of Production Research 11

To generate various test scenarios, five factors are considered: (1), the customer request distribution patterns; (2), the
number of couriers; (3), the maximum desired waiting time T max ; (4), the Back Prob and (5), the weight of centrality
w. We consider four patterns for request distribution which are shown in Figure 5(A)–(D): uniform, bipartite, centripetal
and anti-centripetal. The value in Figure 5 denotes the probability of request arriving at a corresponding vertex. Taking
the bipartite patterns, for example, the black vertex in the left gets an arriving request with probability 0.0225, so there
are about 90% requests will be arrive at the left part in the service area (0.0225 × 40 = 0.9), and only 10% request will
be arrive at the right part. The purpose of designing these four distribution patterns is to reflect various possible scenar-
ios in reality. The number of courier can be 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5; the maximum waiting time is set as 30, 60 or 120 min; the
Back Prob can be {0, 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.07, 0.09, 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1}; and
the weight of centrality varies is set as {0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.06, 0.09, 0.1, 0.3, 0.6, 0.8, 1, 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6}. As a result, a
total of 15,960 (4 × 5 × 3 × 19 × 14) test scenarios are generated. The proposed pickup policy and the two benchmark
policies are applied for each test scenario. For each test scenario, we conducted 50 simulation experiments to obtain the
robustness of results.

4.3 Performance enhancement for waiting time

We record the waiting time for every request in each test scenario and calculate the average reduction in waiting time
for the proposed pickup policy (CP) over the NN and FCFS policies. The average reduction in waiting time over NN
policy can be calculated as follows:

Waiting time for NN policy  Waiting time for the pickup policy
Average reduction of wating time ¼ (4)
Wating time for NN policy
Figure 6 shows the average reduction in waiting time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the NN policy. In each
subfigure, the horizontal axis denotes the probability of going back to the local station (Back Prob), and the vertical
axis presents the value for the average reduction in waiting time; the subfigures in each row reflect the condition of dif-
ferent customer request distribution patterns, and the subfigures in each column denote the number of couriers. As
shown in Figure 6, the centrality-based pickup policy dominantly outperforms the NN policy in almost all test scenarios.

Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal

100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=1

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=2

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
T-max
100% 100% 100% 100%
=30
Courier=3

50% 50% 50% 50%

T-max
0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
=60

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=4

T-max
50% 50% 50% 50% =120

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=5

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 6. The average reduction of waiting time for the CP over the NN policy.
12 X. Cheng et al.

This result supports the potential of the centrality-based pickup policy in reducing the waiting time for customer request
under different conditions.
In detail, on one hand, focusing on the subfigures in each row (e.g. the first row), we can find that the performance
of centrality-based pickup policy in the situation where the customer request distribution is centripetally optimal than
other situation, such as uniform, bipartite and anti-centripetal. Taking the first row in Figure 6 as an example, when
Back Prob approaches 0, the reduction in waiting time is up to 90, 80, 70 and 50% for the condition of customer
request distribution is centripetal, uniform, bipartite and anti-centripetal, respectively. There is one probable reason.
When customer request distribution follows the centripetal patterns, there are many requests arrive at the central vertex,
so it is very easy to conduct the CP.
On the other hand, focusing on the subfigure in each column (e.g. the column of Uniform), when the number of
courier is small (e.g. courier = 1, 2, 3), the performance enhancement for the pickup policy is significant as Back Prob
approaches 0, which means the performance enhancement decreases as the value of Back Prob increases because the
increase in Back Prob reduces the benefit of dispatching to the central request (the courier always get back to the local
station). However, these trends do not exist when the number of courier is big (e.g. courier = 4, 5). Two probable expla-
nations are offered. First, there are so many couriers that the service area is not busy, and every courier can easily get
to the closest request site, which means that the NN policy is also suitable when many couriers are available. Second,
the weight of centrality denoted as w also influences the performance of the pickup policy: the value of w influences the
value of Cu, such that the performance of the pickup policy is significant when Cu is large, based on Equation (2), for
more detail discussion about the influence of w, please refer to supplementary information.3 Moreover, a threshold value
exists for Back Prob; the performance of the pickup policy is significantly changed when Back Prob exceeds this
threshold. For example, when courier = 1 and T max = 30 min, the threshold value is 0.4. Another feature is that the
number of courier influences this threshold value. For example, the threshold value is 0.4 when courier equals one and
0.9 when courier is 5. Besides, the maximum desired waiting time denoted as T max influences the performance of the
pickup policy. For example, when courier equals one, the reduction in waiting time is up to 70, 80, and 90% when
T max is 30, 60 and 120 min, respectively. This feature indicates that a high T max can amplify the contribution of
centrality measures.
Similarly, Figure 7 shows the average reduction in waiting time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the FCFS
policy, in which we can obtain same conclusions. In all of the test conditions, the centrality-based pickup policy is

Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal

100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=1

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=2

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100% T-max

=30
Courier=3

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 T-max
=60
100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=4

50% 50% 50% 50%

T-max
=120
0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=5

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 7. The average reduction in waiting time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the FCFS policy.
 International Journal of Production Research 13

significantly optimal compared with the FCFS policy, and the performance enhancement is weakened with an increase
in the number of couriers; a threshold value exists for Back Prob, and this value changes along with the changing num-
ber of couriers. Besides, the performance enhancement under the scenario where customer request distribution follows
the centripetal pattern is optimal than other distribution patterns.

4.4 Performance variation for waiting time

To evaluate the performance deviation of the pickup policy over the NN and FCFS policy, we calculate the standard
deviation of waiting time and the average reduction in standard deviation under every test condition. The average reduc-
tion in standard deviation over NN policy can be calculated by Equation (5).

Standard deviation for NN policy  Standard deviation for the pickup policy
Average reduction of variation ¼ (5)
Standard deviation for NN policy
Figure 8 shows the average reduction in standard deviation for the centrality-based pickup policy over NN policy. The
vertical axis denotes the value for average reduction in standard deviation for waiting time. The results show that the
centrality-based pickup policy can significantly reduce the variation under different test conditions. First, when the cus-
tomer request distribution is centripetal, the performance of the CP is optimal than other request distribution patterns,
such as uniform, bipartite and anti-centripetal, due to the average reduction in standard deviation being always bigger
than other scenarios. Second, the average reduction in standard deviation decreases when Back Prob increases under
the conditions when the number of courier is small (courier = 1, 2, 3), but this phenomenon is not observed when the
courier number is high. When many couriers service the same area, the load of that service area is so low that every
courier can easily be dispatched to the closest request site, thereby diminishing the contribution of CP. Third, a threshold
value for Back Prob also exists under each test condition. This threshold value is very close to the threshold value in
the situation of average reduction of waiting time in the former subsection (Section 4.2). Fourth, the reduction in stan-
dard deviation is improved as T max increases. For example, when T max = 30 min in subfigure 1, the standard deviation
reaches up to 70%; when T max = 120 min, the maximum of standard deviation is up to 80%.
Similarly, Figure 9 shows the average reduction in standard deviation for the centrality-based pickup policy over
FCFS policy; the same results have also been obtained. For example, when the system is busy and courier = 1, 2 or 3,

Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal

100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=1

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=2

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
T-max
100% 100% 100% 100% =30
Courier=3

50% 50% 50% 50%

T-max
0% 0% 0% 0% =60
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=4

T-max
50% 50% 50% 50% =120

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=5

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 8. The average reduction in standard deviation for the centrality-based pickup policy over NN policy.
14 X. Cheng et al.
Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal
100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=1

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=2

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 T-max
=30
100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=3

50% 50% 50% 50%

T-max
=60
0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=4

T-max
50% 50% 50% 50% =120

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

100% 100% 100% 100%

Courier=5

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 9. The average reduction in standard deviation for the centrality-based pickup policy over FCFS policy.

the performance of reduction in standard deviation diminishes as the Back Prob increases. In addition, when the
customer request arrives at more central place, the performance of the CP is optimal. Besides, the value of T max can
magnify the performance of the pickup policy.

4.5 Performance enhancement for total time

Another indicator used in measuring the performance of the centrality-based pickup policy is the total time of serving a
set of requests; this indicator reflects the operation efficiency in the pickup process for express courier company. In this
study, a total of 10,000 requests are considered. We calculate the reduction in total time of the pickup policy over NN
or FCFS policy. Equation (6) shows the reduction in total time over NN policy.

Reduction in total time NN policy  Reduction in total time for the Pickup policy
Reduction in total time for NN policy ¼
Reduction in total time for NN policy
(6)
The performance of reduction in total time for the centrality-based pickup policy compared with the NN policy is shown
in Figure 10. When the number of courier is small (e.g. courier = 1, 2), which means that the service area is very busy,
the performance of reduction in total time is significant. However, the performance is not significant when the number
of courier is high. The reduction can be up to 30% when courier = 1 but can be only up to 4% when courier = 4, partic-
ularly, there are almost no reduction in the total time when the courier equals 5. In addition, a threshold value was
observed for Back Prob; the feature of this threshold value is mostly similar with that in Subsection of 4.2. For a small
number of couriers, this value is changed with the variation. Furthermore, the centrality-based pickup policy is best
when the customer requests distribution is centripetal. For example, under the scenario when the number of courier
equals one and the Back Prob approaches zero, the performance of reduction in total time of the centripetal scenario is
up to 20%, but performance for the other three scenarios are all below 20%. Besides, the value of T max also influences
the performance of reduction in total time. For example, up to 30% reduction can be achieved when T max = 120 min
but only up to 18% when T max = 30 min, as shown in Subfigure 1.
Figure 11 shows the performance of reduction in total time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the FCFS pol-
icy. The results indicates that the centrality-based pickup policy is optimal than the FCFS policy in almost all test sce-
narios. Similar results can be obtained. Such as, the performance of reduction is significant when the number of courier
 International Journal of Production Research 15
Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal
40% 40% 40% 40%
Courier=1

20% 20% 20% 20%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

30% 30% 30% 30%

Courier=2

20% 20% 20% 20%

10% 10% 10% 10%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 T-max
=30
20% 20% 20% 20%
Courier=3

10% 10% 10% 10%

T-max
0% 0% 0% 0% =60
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

6% 6% 6% 6%
Courier=4

4% 4% 4% 4%
T-max
2% 2% 2% 2% =120
0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0.3% 0.3% 0.3% 0.3%

Courier=5

0.2% 0.2% 0.2% 0.2%

0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 10. The reduction in total time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the NN policy.

Uniform Bipartite Centripetal Anti-centripetal

100% 100% 100% 100%
Courier=1

50% 50% 50% 50%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

60% 60% 60% 60%

Courier=2

40% 40% 40% 40%

20% 20% 20% 20%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 T-max
=30
40% 40% 40% 40%
Courier=3

20% 20% 20% 20%

T-max
0% 0% 0% 0% =60
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

20% 20% 20% 20%

Courier=4

T-max
10% 10% 10% 10% =120

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

3% 3% 3% 3%
Courier=5

2% 2% 2% 2%

1% 1% 1% 1%

0% 0% 0% 0%
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob Back-Prob

Figure 11. The reduction in total time for the centrality-based pickup policy over the FCFS policy.

is small. For example, when courier equals 1, the reduction can up to 65%, but when courier equals 5, the reduction is
only up to 2%. In addition, a threshold value also exists and the performance of the pickup policy is also influenced by
the value of T max .
According to these observations from subsection 4.3 to 4.5, we can find that the reduction in both waiting time
(mean and standard deviation) and total time over the NN and FCFS policy reflects the effectiveness of the proposed
pickup policy. First, the performance of the pickup policy is influenced by the value of Back Prob. The Back Prob
16 X. Cheng et al.

indicates the probability of going back to local station, so under the situation where this probability is small, the courier
can effectively serve the neighbouring requests when he is dispatched to the central requests, which amplifying the effi-
cacy of the centrality-based pickup policy. So the performance of the proposed policy is significant when the probability
is small. Second, the customer request distribution pattern also influences the performance of the CP. The experiments
result shows that this policy is more suitable for the situation where the customer request distribution follows the cen-
tripetal pattern. Indeed, when customer request arrives at more central among the local station, it is very easy to conduct
the CP. This conclusion also indicates the importance of the selection of local station for the express courier company.
However, the detail analysis of station/location selection exceeds the scope of this paper; one can refer to the literature
(Kahraman, Ruan, et al. 2003) and (Silva and de la Figuera 2007). Third, the performance of the centrality-based pickup
policy is also influenced by the numbers of couriers and the T max . The number of couriers reflects the busyness of the
service area, if this number is big, the courier can effectively be dispatched to the request location based on NN or
FCFS policy, as the request always closes to the courier. So the performance of CP is not significant when number of
couriers is big. Moreover, the T max also can amplify the efficacy of the pickup policy.

5. Conclusions and discussions

The express industry has seen considerable growth in the past years, which resulted in an unprecedented fierce competi-
tion. With the purpose of improving service quality and operation efficiency for express company, we focus on the prob-
lem of dispatching courier to pick up parcels in the situation of courier-triggered pickup service. This problem is
distinct from the traditional VRPs as it is enclosed two characteristics: (1), the dynamically arriving of new customer
requests, and (2), the uncertainty of parcels and customer service demands. Under this situation, a novel and effective
policy for routing courier to pick up parcels is proposed based on the notion of centrality measure, which comes from
network science. Besides, based on the proposed pickup policy, we also propose a prototype of fleet management
system which helps the fleet managers to dynamically dispatch the express courier for picking up parcels. Compared
with two benchmark dispatching policies, namely NN policy and FCFS policy, the performance of the proposed pickup
policy is evaluated by two indicators: customer waiting time, which reflects the service quality of express company; and
total service time, which reflects the operation efficiency of express company.
The essence of the centrality-based pickup policy is dispatching the courier to the most central request location in a
service area, such that this courier has the opportunity to serve the neighbouring requests at a maximum rate of comple-
tion in that service area. We conduct an comprehensive computational experiments, in which several factors are consid-
ered, such as the customer request distribution patterns, the number of couriers, the weight of centrality w, Back Prob
and the T max . The pickup policy dominantly outperforms the NN and FCFS policies in almost all test scenarios based
on the results of these experiments. In detail, the performance of the pickup policy decreases when Back Prob
increases. Back Prob represents the probability of going back to the local station when servicing a request. A small
Back Prob indicates that high probability of continuing serving the requests, so the efficacy of the centrality is signifi-
cant when the value of Back Prob is small. Moreover, the CP is more suitable for the situation where the customer
request distribution follows the centripetal pattern. Likewise, the number of couriers, which reflects the system load of
the service area – when the number is small, the service area is exceedingly busy, also influences the performance of
the centrality-based pickup policy. Many requests are waiting to be serviced when the service area is busy, thus, the
courier can be easily dispatched to the more central request location and serve the neighbouring requests at a minimal
time. However, the courier can be easily dispatched to the closest request location when the number of couriers is high,
so the performance enhancement of the proposed pickup policy is not significant. In addition, the T max representing the
maximum waiting time also affects the performance of the pickup policy. Thus, under the right selection of parameters,
the proposed pickup policy can significantly reduce the waiting time as well as the total time compared with the NN
and FCFS policy.
The present study can be embedded into the DSS of express companies constructing computer-based systems to help
them in real-time dispatch decisions. This dispatching system can enhance the competition of the express company own-
ing to the reduction in waiting time and total service time. However, there are also several limitations in this paper.
First, the centrality-based pickup policy only takes into account the courier that has just been idled after dispatching.
We do not consider the possibility that a busy courier can service more quickly even after finishing the service of cur-
rently assigned request. Thus, this pickup policy may be improved by considering both the idle and busy couriers when
making dispatching decisions every time. Second, another problem is that the priority of request is not considered. For
example, some requests must be served at once, but other requests can wait for a longer time. This situation can be con-
sidered by assigning different T max to different requests in this pickup policy. These problems would constitute further
research that extends the present study. Another research direction is considering the expected future dynamic events
 International Journal of Production Research 17

based on big data analysis for historical information as the computer-based system can store millions of historical
customer requests. As the development of sophisticated methods and intelligent algorithm, the expected future dynamic
events can be predicted. For example, the future expected customer requests can be generated by analysing past request
data. Overall, this kind of research is significant and meaningful for the development of express industry.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the The development grants from Shenzhen Science, Technology and Innovation Commission [grant
number JCYJ20140630144136828]; The Guangdong Provincial Technology Scheme [grant number 2015A020217007]; National
Science-technology Support Plan [project number 2015BAK18B02]; The development grants from Shenzhen Science, Technology
and Innovation Commission [grant number ZDSYS20140509155229805].

Notes
1. Another kind of courier service is intra-city express courier service which only contains the pickup process and delivery process
due to the short distance between origin and destination. The courier routing for intra-city service is the classic pickup and
delivery problem which has been well studied, such as D’Souza, Omkar, et al. (2012), Masson, Ropke, et al. (2014), Nanry and
Barnes (2000) and Ropke and Pisinger (2006).
2. The idea of the Equation (1) is from the centrality measures, particularly, the degree centrality. We consider the reciprocal of t ij
as the weight of edges. However, in order to deal with the situation where t ij equals zero, we add 1 in the denominator.
3. As the space restriction of the format of this paper, we investigate the influence of w on the performance of the centrality-based
pickup policy in the Supplementary Information.

References

Alanis, R., A. Ingolfsson, and B. Kolfal. 2013. “A Markov Chain Model for an EMS System with Repositioning.” Production and
Operations Management 22 (1): 216–231.
Andersson, T., and P. Värbrand. 2007. “Decision Support Tools for Ambulance Dispatch and Relocation.” Journal of the Operational
Research Society 58 (2): 195–201.
Barceló, J., H. Grzybowska, and S. Pardo. 2007. “Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Models, Simulation and City Logistics.” In
Dynamic Fleet Management, 163–195. Springer.
Bard, J. F., and A. I. Jarrah. 2009. “Large-Scale Constrained Clustering for Rationalizing Pickup and Delivery Operations.” Trans-
portation Research Part B: Methodological 43 (5): 542–561.
Batallas, D. A., and A. A. Yassine. 2006. “Information Leaders in Product Development Organizational Networks: Social Network
Analysis of the Design Structure Matrix.” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 53 (4): 570–582.
Bendle, L. J., and I. Patterson. 2010. “The Centrality of Service Organizations and Their Leisure Networks.” The Service Industries
Journal 30 (10): 1607–1619.
Bertsimas, D. J., and G. van Ryzin. 1991. “A Stochastic and Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem in the Euclidean Plane.” Operations
Research 39 (4): 601–615.
Bezuidenhout, C. N., S. Bodhanya, T. Sanjika, M. Sibomana, and G. L. N. Boote. 2012. “Network-analysis Approaches to Deal with
Causal Complexity in a Supply Network.” International Journal of Production Research 50 (7): 1840–1849.
Bock, S. 2010. “Real-time Control of Freight Forwarder Transportation Networks by Integrating Multimodal Transport Chains.”
European Journal of Operational Research 200 (3): 733–746.
Chang, T.-S., and H.-M. Yen. 2012. “City-courier Routing and Scheduling Problems.” European Journal of Operational Research
223 (2): 489–498.
Chen, Y. 1999. “Banking Panics: The Role of the First-come, First-served Rule and Information Externalities.” Journal of Political
Economy 107 (5): 946–968.
Coelho, L. C., and G. Laporte. 2013. “A Branch-and-cut Algorithm for the Multi-product Multi-vehicle Inventory-routing Problem.”
International Journal of Production Research 51 (23–24): 7156–7169.
Cortés, C. E., A. Núñez, and D. Sáez. 2008. “Hybrid Adaptive Predictive Control for a Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem
including Traffic Congestion.” International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing 22 (2): 103–123.
Crainic, T. G., M. Gendreau, and J.-Y. Potvin. 2009. “Intelligent Freight-transportation Systems: Assessment and the Contribution of
Operations Research.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 17 (6): 541–557.
Crucitti, P., V. Latora, and S. Porta. 2006. “Centrality Measures in Spatial Networks of Urban Streets.” Physical Review E 73 (3):
036125.
18 X. Cheng et al.

D’Souza, C., S. N. Omkar, and J. Senthilnath. 2012. “Pickup and Delivery Problem Using Metaheuristics Techniques.” Expert
Systems with Applications 39 (1): 328–334.
Dantzig, G. B., and J. H. Ramser. 1959. “The Truck Dispatching Problem.” Management Science 6 (1): 80–91.
Dean, S. F. 2008. “Why the Closest Ambulance Cannot Be Dispatched in an Urban Emergency Medical Services System.” Prehospi-
tal and Disaster Medicine 23 (2): 161–165.
Durugbo, C., and J. C. K. H. Riedel. 2013. “Readiness Assessment of Collaborative Networked Organisations for Integrated Product
and Service Delivery.” International Journal of Production Research 51 (2): 598–613.
Egbelu, P. J., and J. M. Tanchoco. 1984. “Characterization of Automatic Guided Vehicle Dispatching Rules.” International Journal of
Production Research 22 (3): 359–374.
Ferrucci, F., and S. Bock. 2014. “Real-time Control of Express Pickup and Delivery Processes in a Dynamic Environment.” Trans-
portation Research Part B: Methodological 63: 1–14.
Forecasting, O. E. 2005. The Impact of the Express Delivery Industry on the Global Economy. St Aldates: Abbey House.
Freeman, L. C., S. P. Borgatti, and D. R. White. 1991. “Centrality in Valued Graphs: A Measure of Betweenness Based on Network
Flow.” Social Networks 13 (2): 141–154.
Friedkin, N. E. 1991. “Theoretical Foundations for Centrality Measures.” American Journal of Sociology 96 (6): 1478–1504.
Gerkey, B. P., and M. J. Mataric. 2002. “Sold!: Auction Methods for Multirobot Coordination.” IEEE Transactions on Robotics and
Automation 18 (5): 758–768.
Ghiani, G., E. Manni, and C. Triki. 2009. “Anticipatory Algorithms for Same-Day Courier Dispatching.” Transportation Research
Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review 45 (1): 96–106.
Giaglis, G. M., I. Minis, A. Tatarakis, and V. Zeimpekis. 2004. “Minimizing Logistics Risk through Real-time Vehicle Routing and
Mobile Technologies.” International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management 34 (9): 749–764.
Gloor, P. A., M. Paasivaara, D. Schoder, and P. Willems. 2008. “Finding Collaborative Innovation Networks through Correlating
Performance with Social Network Structure.” International Journal of Production Research 46 (5): 1357–1371.
Gómez, D., J. R. Figueira, and A. Eusébio. 2013. “Modeling Centrality Measures in Social Network Analysis Using Bi-criteria
Network Flow Optimization Problems.” European Journal of Operational Research 226 (2): 354–365.
Hu, Z.-H., and Z.-H. Sheng. 2014. “A Decision Support System for Public Logistics Information Service Management and Optimiza-
tion.” Decision Support Systems 59: 219–229.
Hu, D. N., J. L. Zhao, Z. M. Hua, and M. C. S. Wong. 2012. “Network-based Modeling and Analysis of Systemic Risk in Banking
Systems.” MIS Quarterly 36 (4): 1269–1291.
Kahraman, C., D. Ruan, and I. Doǧan. 2003. “Fuzzy Group Decision-making for Facility Location Selection.” Information Sciences
157: 135–153.
Kiss, C., and M. Bichler. 2008. “Identification of Influencers – Measuring Influence in Customer Networks.” Decision Support
Systems 46 (1): 233–253.
de Koster, R., T. Le-Anh, and J. R. van der Meer. 2004. “Testing and Classifying Vehicle Dispatching Rules in Three Real-world
Settings.” Journal of Operations Management 22 (4): 369–386.
Kuo, Y. 2013. “Optimizing Truck Sequencing and Truck Dock Assignment in a Cross Docking System.” Expert Systems with Appli-
cations 40 (14): 5532–5541.
Larsen, A., O. B. Madsen, and M. M. Solomon. 2008. “Recent Developments in Dynamic Vehicle Routing Systems.” In The Vehicle
Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges, 199–218. Springer.
Lee, S. 2012a. “The Role of Centrality in Ambulance Dispatching.” Decision Support Systems 54 (1): 282–291.
Lee, S. 2012b. “Centrality-based Ambulance Dispatching for Demanding Emergency Situations.” Journal of the Operational Research
Society 64 (4): 611–618.
Li, J.-Q., P. B. Mirchandani, and D. Borenstein. 2009. “Real-time Vehicle Rerouting Problems with Time Windows.” European
Journal of Operational Research 194 (3): 711–727.
Lin, J. R., S. Yan, and C. W. Lai. 2013. “International Express Courier Routing and Scheduling under Uncertain Demands.”
Engineering Optimization 45 (7): 881–897.
Lin, C., K. L. Choy, G. T. S. Ho, H. Y. Lam, G. K. H. Pang, and K. S. Chin. 2014. “A Decision Support System for Optimizing
Dynamic Courier Routing Operations.” Expert Systems with Applications 41 (15): 6917–6933.
Mantel, R. J., and H. R. Landeweerd. 1995. “Design and Operational Control of an AGV System.” International Journal of Produc-
tion Economics 41 (1–3): 257–266.
Masson, R., S. Ropke, F. Lehuédé, and O. Péton. 2014. “A Branch-and-cut-and-price Approach for the Pickup and Delivery Problem
with Shuttle Routes.” European Journal of Operational Research 236 (3): 849–862.
Mavrovouniotis, M., and S. Yang. 2015. “Ant Algorithms with Immigrants Schemes for the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem.”
Information Sciences 294: 456–477.
Mezgár, I., and U. Rauschecker. 2014. “The Challenge of Networked Enterprises for Cloud Computing Interoperability.” Computers
in Industry 65 (4): 657–674.
Nanry, W. P., and J. W. Barnes. 2000. “Solving the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows Using Reactive Tabu Search.”
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 34 (2): 107–121.
 International Journal of Production Research 19

Ninikas, G., T. Athanasopoulos, V. Zeimpekis, and I. Minis. 2014. “Integrated Planning in Hybrid Courier Operations.” The
International Journal of Logistics Management 25 (3): 611–634.
Pillac, V., C. Guéret, and A. L. Medaglia. 2012. “An Event-driven Optimization Framework for Dynamic Vehicle Routing.” Decision
Support Systems 54 (1): 414–423.
Pillac, V., M. Gendreau, C. Guéret, and A. L. Medaglia. 2013. “A Review of Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems.” European Jour-
nal of Operational Research 225 (1): 1–11.
Ravindran, K., A. Susarla, D. Mani, and V. Gurbaxani. 2015. “Social Capital and Contract Duration in Buyer-supplier Networks for
Information Technology Outsourcing.” Information Systems Research 26 (2): 379–397.
Ropke, S., and D. Pisinger. 2006. “An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with
Time Windows.” Transportation Science 40 (4): 455–472.
Ruhnau, B. 2000. “Eigenvector-Centrality – A Node-centrality?” Social Networks 22 (4): 357–365.
Silva, F. J. F., and D. S. de la Figuera. 2007. “A Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Constrained Backlogging Probabilities.”
International Journal of Production Research 45 (21): 5117–5134.
Sosa, M. E., S. D. Eppinger, and C. M. Rowles. 2007. “A Network Approach to Define Modularity of Components in Complex
Products.” Journal of Mechanical Design 129: 1118.
Sosa, M., J. Mihm, and T. Browning. 2011. “Degree Distribution and Quality in Complex Engineered Systems.” Journal of Mechani-
cal Design 133: 101008.
Sungur, I., Y. Ren, F. Ordóñez, M. Dessouky, and H. Zhong. 2010. “A Model and Algorithm for the Courier Delivery Problem with
Uncertainty.” Transportation Science 44 (2): 193–205.
Tsai, C.-F., C.-W. Tsai, and C.-C. Tseng. 2003. “A New and Efficient Ant-based Heuristic Method for Solving the Traveling Salesman
Problem.” Expert Systems 20 (4): 179–186.
Urrutiaguer, D. 2004. “Programme Innovations and Networks of French Public Theatres.” The Service Industries Journal 24 (1):
37–55.
Chaiken, J. M., and R. C. Larson. (1972). “Methods for Allocating Urban Emergency Units: A Survey.” Management Science
19 (4-part-2): P110–P130.
Durugbo, C. (2013). “Modelling Information for Collaborative Networks.” Production Planning & Control 26 (1): 34–52.
Lee, S. 2014. “Role of Parallelism in Ambulance Dispatching.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems PP
(99): 1–1.
Leem, B., and H. Chun. 2014. “An Impact of Online Recommendation Network on Demand.” Expert Systems with Applications
41 (4, Part 2): 1723–1729.
Ostergaard, E. H., M. J. Mataric, M. J. Mataric, and G. Sukhatme. (2001). “Distributed Multi-robot Task Allocation for Emergency
Handling.” 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE.
Yan, S., J.-R. Lin, and C.-W. Lai. 2013. “The Planning and Real-time Adjustment of Courier Routing and Scheduling under
Stochastic Travel times and Demands.” Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review 53: 34–48.
Yousefikhoshbakht, M., F. Didehvar, and F. Rahmati. 2014. “Solving the Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Open Vehicle Routing Problem
by a Combined Metaheuristic Algorithm.” International Journal of Production Research 52 (9): 2565–2575.