| To meet customer demand, delivery companies are offering an increasing number of time-definite services. In this study, we examine the strategic design of delivery networks which can efficiently provide these services. Because of the high cost of direct connections, we focus on tree-structured networks. As it may not be possible to identify a tree-structured network that satisfies all of the delivery guarantees, we allow these guarantees to be violated and use the violations as a measure of cost, such that the objective is to minimize the violations in the network.;Two measures of violations are studied, the maximum of the violations and the sum of the violations. Further, as the problem is characterized by a series of parameters which can represent distance, flow volume, and delivery deadlines, we derive different problem variants through variations in these problem parameters. We present both theoretical results on the complexities of these variants and computational results for the developed solution techniques for these variants as well as valuable managerial insights.;We extend the study on tree-structured networks to subgraph-structured networks to further reduce violations. We explore the complexities of these subgraph network design problems. New solution methods are proposed to solve the problems building on the results from the study of the tree-structured networks. |
