Thursday, 13.30 - 15.15, HFB|D

Last Mile Logistics

Last-mile logistics providers are facing a tough challenge in making their operations sustainable in the face of growing customer expectations to further decrease lead times to same-day or even same-hour deliveries, and/or to offer narrow delivery time windows. The providers respond to this challenge by investing in their analytic capabilities to make their last mile logistics are efficient and intelligent as possible.

In addition, innovative and disruptive business models are currently on trial, e.g. asset-lean start-ups use crowdsourced drivers or drivers on demand-dependent contracts. Several companies are experimenting with delivery drones or robots, and how to collaborate with each other ('shared economy').

Many of these developments entail exciting new challenges for operations researchers. In this talk, I will review some of the most recent developments and reflect on future research directions.

Dr Arne K. Strauss is Associate Professor of Operational Research at the University of Warwick (UK). He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from Lancaster University (UK), an M.Sc. in Mathematics from Virginia Tech (USA), and a diploma in Business Mathematics from the University of Trier (Germany).

His main research interests are price optimization, demand modelling and demand management. He worked with various industrial partners including e.g. Lufthansa Systems or the retailer Ocado. He won several prizes for his research including the doctoral prize of the British Operational Research Society for the best PhD dissertation 2009. He is a joint recipient of an IBM Faculty Award in 2015 worth $20,000.

Currently, his work focusses on using demand management to improve last-mile logistics. He also leads a team at Warwick on a Horizon 2020-funded project on capacity ordering and price control in the context of air traffic management.