I wonder how much fuel could be saved by avoiding unnecessary residential deliveries. How many delivery attempt notices does UPS leave every day?
If shippers provided UPS with an email address for the recipient a notice could be sent by email the day before a package is to be delivered. This notice could provide options to let UPS know to wait a day or two to attempt delivery when someone will be there or redirect the package to a commercial address (e.g. the recipient's place of employment).
I recently had a package delivered that required a signature. After the first attempt I called UPS and had it redirected to my work address. Unfortunately they already had it on the truck so I was told they would attempt delivery to my home address the next day before redirecting it.
I was waiting on the front lawn for a UPS delivery to show up while surfing on my laptop one day since it was a nice day. I occasionally took a look at the online tracking page and flipped out when it went from "out for delivery" to a failed delivery notice because the recipient wasn't there. Since I saw no UPS truck driving past my house, and the front door is the only way to make a delivery short of climbing over walls of other houses, you can probably understand why. Called up UPS customer support, asked them to please redeliver the next day because I would be leaving home soon and I didn't want to wait for the delivery, wherever the guy was, so he could save himself some time and effort.
The UPS delivery guy actually came over 4 hours later when I was definitely away from home to put up a delivery attempt notice saying I wasn't there. After I explicitly told two separate customer support folks NOT to deliver the package after I talked to them because I will not be there to pick up - and those two were separate from the initial call I made. This guy seemed to have an absurd sense of humor, because he marked the one and only notice I received that I didn't want as a second delivery attempt.
Your idea will only make sense if UPS actually did their job. They failed catastrophically for me in that incident. Since I seem to get delivery attempt notices quite often, I wonder just how many times they actually stopped by (unfortunately I usually take the car out when I'm going, and that's a different exit..).
Presumably, the most efficient delivery path to take must include left turns... right? I wonder if the efficiency gained by only turning right is greater than the efficiency lost by taking a less efficient route?
What makes you think it's less efficient? They are driving all around the city. The system organizes the deliveries into an efficient route that favors right turns.
I'm sure the system is smart enough to not have them go all the way around the block to backtrack. It just has them hit that location before advancing. I would love to see an illustration of the type of route it outputs.
> The system organizes the deliveries into an efficient route that favors right turns.
Yes, I just wonder how much less efficient "the most efficient route with only right turns" is than the true optimal route. Based on my limited experience with optimal TSP problems, I bet they're fairly close.
I'm imagining a route which gives each driver a chunk of several blocks, then has them hit all locations within the chunk with a right-hand spiral inwards... But I'd love to see the actual routes.
According to the article, the system doesn't really plot an only-right-turns route, it's more like an 80%-right-turns route. But the fact that the software knows enough to know that left turns are worth avoiding is a pretty good piece of work.
Yeah, I doubt it would make a difference at all with a small fleet. The point is that UPS has TONS of vehicles on the road every single day, so shaving a fraction of the costs related to each becomes substantial across the company.
I dunno, I did this (right hand turns whenever possible) like 20 years ago in my first job, when I had to drive around Toronto. So I doubt I am the only one who thought of this before ...
No doubt, I've been doing it too for a while (although my reasons are safety-based). But not everyone has access to a modeling tool (and the data) to create a business case that convinces a big multinational to make it into corporate policy.
UPS trucks in particular would be in a position (at least in the United States, where we drive on the right side of the road) to make less lane changes since stopping for a delivery usually means stopping on the right side of the road. Possibly safer as a result of that as well.
>You see it seems that some analyst at UPS got some modeling software and came up with this plan.
This was a little beyond "some analyst"... even if it was originally the idea of one person, the actual plan took many, many people to implement. Solving real versions of the traveling salesman problem takes a lot of manpower. UPS hires more Industrial Engineers than anyone else.
This is one of the things that Industrial Engineers actually do. In my opinion the pay is much too low for how hard the math is. Lots of linear/dynamic programming + statistics and all sorts of fun algorithms.
Keeping in mind this is a naive analysis of the problem, here's how I think would first try tackling it:
I would first presort the stops in clockwise order around their common centroid, then optimize it with a stochastic algorithm like simulated annealing. Assign costs separately to distance travelled, right turns, and left turns... something like 1 point per kilometer, plus 0.5 points per right turn, plus 2 points per left turn.
Anyone with more experience with optimization problems, feel free to show me up :)
For example, UPS knows that turning left from Main to Elm takes 45 seconds while left from Main to 2nd takes 15 seconds. UPS knows how fast you can actually go on different streets. And, it knows how these things vary with time of day and day of week.
Hmm. UPS could probably make money selling traffic and planning information.
If shippers provided UPS with an email address for the recipient a notice could be sent by email the day before a package is to be delivered. This notice could provide options to let UPS know to wait a day or two to attempt delivery when someone will be there or redirect the package to a commercial address (e.g. the recipient's place of employment).
I recently had a package delivered that required a signature. After the first attempt I called UPS and had it redirected to my work address. Unfortunately they already had it on the truck so I was told they would attempt delivery to my home address the next day before redirecting it.