دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی یکپارچه سازی چیدمان سفارش و مسیریابی خودرو در زمینه B2C تجارت الکترونیک - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

E-commerce sales are increasing every year and customers who buy goods on the Internet have high service level expectations. In order to meet these expectations, a company’s logistics operations need to be performed carefully. Optimizing only internal warehouse processes will often lead to suboptimal solutions. The interrelationship between the order picking process and the delivery process should not be ignored. Therefore, in this study, an order picking problem and a vehicle routing problem with time windows and release dates are solved simultaneously using a single optimization framework. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that an order picking problem and a vehicle routing problem are integrated. A mixed integer linear programming formulation for this integrated order picking-vehicle routing problem (OP-VRP) is provided. The integrated OPVRP is solved for small instances and the results are compared to these of an uncoordinated approach. Computational experiments show that integration can lead to cost savings of 14% on average. Furthermore, higher service levels can be offered by allowing customers to request their orders later and still get delivered within the same time windows.

7 Conclusions and future research opportunities

B2C e-commerce sales are increasing every year. Customers expect a fast and accurate delivery. In order to fulfill these high customer expectations all supply chain functions have to be optimized simultaneously. In this paper, an order picking process and a vehicle routing problem are integrated into a single optimization problem, i.e., an integrated order picking-vehicle routing problem (OP-VRP), in a B2C e-commerce context. As in the literature, most integrated problems consider a production environment, first production scheduling and order picking processes are compared before an integrated OP-VRP is formulated. In general, different terminologies are used to define rather similar concepts. The related concepts are linked with each other. For instance, batching and zoning in a warehouse context are related with corresponding processes in a production environment. In both a production context and a warehouse, processed goods need to be delivered to customers. Consequently, there are interdependencies between production and distribution as well as between warehousing and distribution. According to the authors, it is the first time order picking and vehicle routing decisions are integrated. Mathematical formulations for a single order picking problem, a vehicle routing problem with time windows and release dates, and an integrated problem are presented. The performance of the proposed integrated OPVRP is compared to an uncoordinated approach in which first an OPP is solved and afterwards a VRP. The total costs obtained by using an uncoordinated approach are compared to the total costs obtained by using the integrated approach.