Currently, there is no scientific justification for the legal nature of postal forwarding services, despite fact that their existence reflected in Article 1 Federal Law June 30, 2003 No. 87-FZ «On Forwarding Activities». There are unanimous opinions on correlation services with forwarding, regulated by rules Ch. 41 Civil Code Russian Federation. This constrains development legislation th...

Many transportation providers such as package delivery companies and postal service organizations face the problem of designing a transportation network in order to service their customers. This network must balance the requirement of on-time delivery under tight time window constraints with the goal of low-cost operations of the fleet. Until recently this task was usually performed by planners...

The United States Postal Service (USPS) delivers more than 200 billion items per year. Transporting these items in a timely and cost-efficient way is a key issue if USPS is to meet its service and financial goals. The Highway Corridor Analytic Program (HCAP) is a tool that aids transportation analysts in identifying cost saving opportunities in the USPS surface transportation network. Use of th...

A vision-based fast postal envelope identification system for moving machine printed Chinese postal envelopes is proposed. Our system uses a high-speed camera to capture the image of envelopes running on the convey device and then recognizes the postal address and postcode on the envelopes. A vocabulary of 4590 categories of characters are supported, which include 4516 frequently used Chinese c...

BACKGROUND Response rates by general practitioners (GPs) to postal surveys have consistently fallen, compromising the validity of this type of research. If postal survey work is to continue we need to understand GPs' reasons for not participating and respond appropriately. AIM To investigate GPs' reasons for not responding to postal surveys. METHOD A qualitative study was carried out to det...

The purpose of this paper is to present a full-scale model of the tour scheduling problem as it arises in the United States Postal Service, and to examine several scenarios aimed at reducing the size of the workforce. The problem is formulated as a pure integer linear program and solved with CPLEX. The baseline model includes both full-time and part-time workers, as well as the principal constr...