Abstract
•A method is proposed to control orders and schedule routings of parcel pickup and delivery.•An optimal policy for controlling orders to maximize profitability is derived.•A reinforcement learning with an artificial neural network is utilized to solve the problem.•A continuous-variable feedback control approach is used to schedule multiple vehicle routings.•The proposed approach is beneficial when only limited number of vehicles is available.
Today many domains have begun dealing with more complex and practical problems thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we study the crowdsourced parcel delivery problem, a new type of transportation, with consideration of complex and practical cases, such as multiple delivery vehicles, just-in-time (JIT) pickup and delivery, minimum fuel consumption, and maximum profitability. For this we suggest a learning-based logistics planning and scheduling (LLPS) algorithm that controls admission of order requests and schedules the routes of multiple vehicles altogether. For the admission control, we utilize reinforcement learning (RL) with a function approximation using an artificial neural network (ANN). Also, we use a continuous-variable feedback control algorithm to schedule routes that minimize both JIT penalty and fuel consumption. Computational experiments show that the LLPS outperforms other similar approaches by 32% on average in terms of average reward earned from each delivery order. In addition, the LLPS is even more advantageous when the rate of order arrivals is high and the number of vehicles that transport parcels is low.
