Time Slot Management in Attended Home Delivery

Many e‐tailers providing attended home delivery, especially e‐grocers, offer narrow delivery time slots to ensure satisfactory customer service. The choice of delivery time slots has to balance marketing and operational considerations, which results in a complex planning problem. We study the problem of selecting the set of time slots to offer in each of the zip codes in a service region. The selection needs to facilitate cost‐effective delivery routes, but also needs to ensure an acceptable level of service to the customer. We present a fully automated approach that is capable of producing high‐quality delivery time slot offerings in a short amount of time. Computational experiments reveal the value of this approach and the impact of the environment on the underlying trade‐offs.