Preliminary Exploration for Long-Distance Non-Standardized Delivery

As an emerging delivery pattern, long-distance non-standardized delivery (LND) is receiving the attention of large logistics companies. Despite the growing demand and customer market for LND, so far there is no mature logistics platform for LND. For logistics companies planning to carry out LND services, there is currently no feasible and effective operations methodology. This paper summarizes the characteristics of LND from the perspective of operations and preliminarily explores the operations methodology of LND. Specifically, the two issues, driver assignment and order settlement for LND, are discussed in detail. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first one to study the complete operations methodology for LND. Our proposed methodology could help these large logistics companies that have already launched long-distance standardized delivery services expand the scope of their service. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed driver assignment and order settlement methods. Finally, the paper discusses the impact of drivers’ human factors on LND operations and concludes with several interesting findings. These findings can help the future exploration of how to design a more efficient and beneficial logistics platform for LND.