Essays on the design and logistics of alternative delivery systems for newspapers

This dissertation addresses logistics problems arising in the design of so called Alternative Delivery Systems. These are included among the diverse efforts that newspaper companies in America are undertaking to enhance their value as sales vehicles for American retailers. The first contribution of the dissertation is in providing insight into the kind of phenomena that have forced the newspaper industry to seek new ways to serve their traditional advertisers, as well as providing a taxonomy of the type of systems that may come into existence in the future development of the newspaper industry. After developing that framework, the dissertation proposes a class of systems that are likely to be the first stage of the alternative delivery business for many newspapers specially the small and medium sized ones. These systems are characterized by the attempt to use excess capacity from the delivery of newspapers, that normally occurs in most newspapers after the peak hours of service. The dissertation proposes a large scale back hauling operation as a plausible way to use that excess capacity for the delivery of alternative products. Three models are presented, namely SBLRP (Single Backhaul Location Routing Problem), MBLRP (Multiple Backhaul Location Routing Problem) and DDBLRP (Dual Depot Backhaul Location Routing Problem); mathematical programming formulations are obtained and solution algorithms are developed that try to compromise solution quality with practicality and speed. Theoretical lower bounds are also developed to test the quality of the solutions generated by the heuristics proposed. Extensive computational results for a case study from a mid-size newspaper are presented and analyzed for the first two models. Finally some other modelling ideas are suggested that can generate even more sophisticated treatments of the alternative delivery problem in the future.