Shenle Pan, Vaggelis Giannikas, Yufei Han, Etta Grover-Silva and Bin Qiao
The development of e-grocery allows people to purchase food online and benefit from home delivery service. Nevertheless, a high rate of failed deliveries due to the customer’s…
Abstract
Purpose
The development of e-grocery allows people to purchase food online and benefit from home delivery service. Nevertheless, a high rate of failed deliveries due to the customer’s absence causes significant loss of logistics efficiency, especially for perishable food. The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative approach to use customer-related data to optimize e-grocery home delivery. The approach estimates the absence probability of a customer by mining electricity consumption data, in order to improve the success rate of delivery and optimize transportation.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodological approach consists of two stages: a data mining stage that estimates absence probabilities, and an optimization stage to optimize transportation.
Findings
Computational experiments reveal that the proposed approach could reduce the total travel distance by 3-20 percent, and theoretically increase the success rate of first-round delivery approximately by18-26 percent.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed approach combines two attractive research streams on data mining and transportation planning to provide a solution for e-commerce logistics.
Practical implications
This study gives an insight to e-grocery retailers and carriers on how to use customer-related data to improve home delivery effectiveness and efficiency.
Social implications
The proposed approach can be used to reduce environmental footprint generated by freight distribution in a city, and to improve customers’ experience on online shopping.
Originality/value
Being an experimental study, this work demonstrates the effectiveness of data-driven innovative solutions to e-grocery home delivery problem. The paper also provides a methodological approach to this line of research.
Details
Keywords
Chao Wang, Jianbo He, Zhaodong Jin, Shenle Pan, Mariam Lafkihi and Xiangtianrui Kong
Today's logistics industry is facing severe challenges since global transportation demand increases substantially. Carriers are urged to reduce empty loads and CO2 emissions…
Abstract
Purpose
Today's logistics industry is facing severe challenges since global transportation demand increases substantially. Carriers are urged to reduce empty loads and CO2 emissions through collaboration. Therefore, the concept of Physical Internet (PI) came into being. However, PI is still in its infancy. It is difficult to understand its sophisticated coordination mechanism, which makes learning of the concept more complicated.
Design/methodology/approach
Gamification is an effective approach to help students improve their learning curve. At the same time, the psychological and behavioral changes in learning will also pose an impact on learning efficiency. This paper introduces a PI transportation game and designs a set of gamification teaching experiments. In the experiment, a control group and three experimental groups are set up, and the experiment was designed to respond to a plethora of research questions using the methods of T-test, correlation analysis and regression analysis. Experimental results were analyzed through the method of multivariate statistics.
Findings
This paper looks for superior pedagogical methods and procedures for students to learn PI while providing suggestions for PI's learning among undergraduates. The authors found (1) gamification teaching will make participants feel more satisfied and master more knowledge points; (2) the scores of logistics testing have been significantly improved after gamification teaching and (3) flow experience has a significant impact on game revenue.
Originality/value
This is the first study about the impact of gamification on teaching and learning PI. The authors apply the methods of T-test, correlation analysis and regression analysis to analyze the collected data. The paper proves that gamification can help students learn PI and that flow experience can improve the efficiency of students learning PI.