Research seminar: Remy Spliet

Title: Dynamic time slot management in attended home delivery

Speaker: Remy Spliet

Affiliation: Erasmus University Rotterdam

Bio: Remy Spliet is Professor at the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus School of Economics, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research is in the field of Operations Research with a focus on Transportation.

Abstract: In attended home delivery, someone needs to be home to receive a delivery. This is for instance the case in online grocery shopping, where deliveries do not fit most mailboxes, and might need to be refrigerated on receipt. To facilitate this, it is increasingly common for suppliers to offer a menu of time slots from which the receiver can choose. The delivery will take place during this time slot, e.g., between 10:00 and 11:00. In a joint research project with AH.nl, the largest Dutch e‐grocer, we developed decision support tools to construct this menu dynamically when customers arrive. Challenges arise due to the short response time required of such systems, while constructing a menu involves solving a routing problem to construct feasible delivery schedules. Moreover, customers interact simultaneously with the order‐system which might invalidate offered time slot menus, resulting in disappointed customers. In this talk, initial research efforts are discussed which seemed very promising in theory but did not perform so well when put into practice. This inspired further research to overcome these new challenges observed in practice, which is also discussed.

There will be coffee and cafe for those signing up by 26 January 2026.