On Fairness Aspects of Customer Acceptance Mechanisms in Dynamic Vehicle Routing

In many service applications, customers can request service dynamically during the service time horizon and may be served the same day. For the service provider, these requests are stochastic and due to working hour limitations, usually not all customer requests can be accepted for same-day service. Decisions are made about service acceptances and routing. The objective is to maximize the expected number of accepted customers. Solution approaches can be classified as being either selective regarding the customer acceptance or as being non-selective. Non-selective approaches accept every feasible request, while selective approaches may decline same-day service although an acceptance would be feasible. This may save time for further acceptances later and may enable more overall acceptances. In this paper, we present an experimental setup to analyze the impact of the customer acceptance mechanism on the objective function and the “unfairness” within the service area. We show that selective customer acceptance mechanisms improve the objective value at the cost of a higher unfairness compared to non-selective customer acceptance mechanisms.