Route reoptimization's impact on delivery efficiency

A drawback of daily reoptimization of delivery routes as a response tactic to randomly fluctuating customer demands concerns inefficiencies in actual freight deliveries to customers. Underlying these inefficiencies are route reoptimization's potentially erratic day-to-day changes in delivery routes, and hence, highly unstable route assignments for delivery vehicle drivers. This study's primary contributions are that it develops, quantifies, and models a robust metric for assessing the resulting requirements that the instability places on drivers to learn multiple routing assignments. A key research result is that regression analysis can be used to model the behavior of a metric.