Real-time fleet management in the courier industry

In this talk we describe an innovative real-time fleet management system designed and implemented for eCourier Ltd (London, UK). In particular, we describe both the business challenges and benefits of the implementation of a real-time fleet management system (with reference to empirical metrics such as courier efficiency, service times, and financial data), as well as the theoretical and implementation challenges of constructing such a system. We first illustrate the overall architecture, then depict the main algorithms, including the service territory zoning methodology, the travel time forecasting procedure and the job allocation heuristic. As far as the latter component is concerned, we present a novel allocation procedure based on a simulation-optimization methodology.