Home delivery services require the attendance of the customer during delivery. Hence, retailers and customers mutually agree on a delivery time window in the booking process. In this presentation, we investigate the value of historical booking data in the decision of whether to accept a customer request for a particular window in an online booking process. We propose a sampling approach to assess the impact of the current request on route efficiency and the ability to accept future requests. In particular, we investigate the amount of booking data as well as identify patterns that are beneficial for sampling and can help improving the acceptance decision as well as the retailer's revenue. We apply these techniques to the data from an online grocery in Germany.
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