Managing Concurrent Interactions in Online Time Slot Booking Systems for Attended Home Delivery

Many goods and services require the customer to be at home to receive the delivery. In the context of attended home delivery, customers can typically choose from a menu of delivery time slots. We consider the problem of dynamically managing the offered time slots and delivery bookings given the available fleet capacity. When multiple customers interact with the online booking system at the same time, this can lead to conflicts. Although managing such concurrent interactions is an important challenge in attended home delivery systems, it has not yet been addressed in the literature. We present a concurrency control strategy and several fast route planning approaches to manage time slots in real time. To combine fast response times with high quality slotting decisions, we introduce background procedures that use the time between successive order placements to improve the performance of the time slot offer and validation procedures. Our detailed computational experiments based on realistic instances provide insights into the effectiveness of our background procedures and the complex trade-offs between waiting times, valid orders, and invalid orders. We also discuss several relevant new areas of research in concurrency control for time slot management. Funding: This work was supported by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Grant 438-213-204]. It is co-funded by ORTEC B.V. and AH.nl.