An Application for Simulations at Large Pickup and Delivery Service Providers

Over time, large scale pickup and delivery providers acquire considerable amounts of data on customer orders, including order times, amount and configurations of freight, as well as the locations for pickup and delivery. If their fleet is equipped with tracking devices, additional GPS data can be provided and actual travel routes can be saved for later evaluation. In this paper, we present two use cases for a discrete eventbased simulation in the context of transportation companies. We also discuss ways to use company-internal data in order to simulate near-realistic scenarios that build the foundation for internal education and training of human dispatchers and that can at the same time be used for benchmark tests for different allocation and scheduling strategies.