مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مسیریابی خودرو در زمینه B2C تجارت الکترونیک – اسپرینگر 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.

Introduction

In the last decades, a lot of manufacturing plants moved from Europe to countries with low costs to remain competitive (EESC 2003, 2014). This offshoring led to a loss of approximately 3.5 million jobs in the manufacturing industry in the EU since 2008 (EESC 2014). At the same time, many multinational companies built a distribution center (DC) in Europe. These DCs are generally responsible for the deliveries of goods produced outside Europe to European customers within the context of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce transactions (Hultkrantz and Lumsden 2001). In the last decade, the European B2C e-commerce sales has been growing annually with 12% on average. More specifically, in 2015, the B2C e-commerce sales grew with approximately 13.5% in Europe. This expansion of the B2C e-commerce sector has led to the creation of approximately 2.5 million jobs in Europe (Ecommerce Europe 2016). The rise of e-commerce creates new challenges and opportunities for the logistics system (Richards 2014). New distribution channels and structures arise, which lead to more complex distribution networks. For instance, goods are often transported from a DC to a postal office depot from where the goods are delivered to customers by a mailman, or even delivered directly from a DC to the end customer (Hultkrantz and Lumsden 2001). As such, compared to traditional distribution networks, wholesalers and retailers are often bypassed. Furthermore, in an e-commerce context, customers order more frequently in smaller quantities (Gong and de Koster 2008). As a consequence, the number of consignments increases (Hultkrantz and Lumsden 2001). In Europe, approximately 4.2 billion B2C parcels are sent to customers annually (Ecommerce Europe 2016). This large number of smaller quantities makes it more challenging to consolidate customer orders in an efficient way.