Attended home delivery in Indian public distribution system: an iterated local search approach

Purpose In the modern era of e-grocery, attended home delivery (AHD) has been identified as a crucial part of the last-mile delivery problem. This paper aims to deal with a real-life last-mile-delivery problem in the context of the Indian public distribution system (PDS). The authors identified two different environments for the said AHD problem and proposed two different approaches to address the issue under these problem settings. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the authors first consider the problem in a static environment and propose an iterated local search (ILS) integrated with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) meta-heuristic algorithm to obtain a routing solution. Thereafter, they extend the study in a dynamic environment where new delivery requests occur dynamically and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. For the dynamic case, multiple scenarios for the occurrence of delivery requests are considered to determine decisions regarding the opportunity to include a new request into the current solution. Findings By computational experiments, the authors show that the proposed approach performs significantly well for large size problem instances. They demonstrate the differences and advantages of the dynamic problem setting through a set of different scenarios. Also, they present a comparative analysis to show the benefits of adopting the algorithm in dynamic routing scenarios. Research limitations/implications Future research may extend the scope of this study by incorporating stochastic delivery failure probabilities and customer behavior affecting the delivery response. Also, the present study does not take inventory policies at the depot into consideration. It will be of interest to see how the system performs under the uncertainty of supply from the depot. Despite the limitations, the authors believe that this study provides food for thought and encouragements for practitioners. Practical implications This study shows the benefits of adopting an AHD problem in a dynamic setting in terms of customer service as compared to a traditional static environment. The authors clearly demonstrate the differences and advantages of the dynamic problem setting through a set of different scenario analysis. Social implications This paper investigates a real-life AHD problem faced by the Department of Food, Supply and Consumer Affairs, India. The findings of this study will be of particular interest to the policy-makers to build a more robust PDS in India. Originality/value The study is unique and highly relevant for real-world applications and can help build a more robust AHD system. Also, the proposed solution approaches to aid the problem in both static and dynamic routing scenarios will be of particular interest to practitioners.