Measures of dynamism and urgency in logistics

Dynamism was originally defined as the proportion of online versus offline orders in the literature on dynamic logistics. Such a definition however, loses meaning when considering purely dynamic problems where all customer requests arrive dynamically. Existing measures of dynamism are limited to either (1) measuring the proportion of online versus offline orders or (2) measuring urgency, a concept that is orthogonal to dynamism, instead. The present paper defines separate and independent formal definitions of dynamism and urgency applicable to purely dynamic problems. Using these formal definitions, instances of a dynamic logistic problem with varying levels of dynamism and urgency were constructed and several route scheduling algorithms were executed on these problem instances. Contrary to previous findings, the results indicate that dynamism is positively correlated with route quality; urgency, however, is negatively correlated with route quality. The paper contributes the theory that dynamism and urgency are two distinct concepts that deserve to be treated separately. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.