Cited By
View all- Dai BXiao TLiu YLi F(2024)A Profit Allocation Mechanism for Multiple-Channels Order Fulfillment System of an E-Retailers AllianceSage Open10.1177/2158244024130078114:4Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
Learning to Minimize Cost to Serve for Multi-Node Multi-Product Order Fulfilment in Electronic Commerce
Authors: 
Pranavi Pathakota, Kunwar Zaid, Anulekha Dhara, Hardik Meisheri, Shaun D'Souza, Dheeraj Shah, Harshad KhadilkarAuthors Info & Claims
Pranavi Pathakota, Kunwar Zaid, Anulekha Dhara, Hardik Meisheri, Shaun D'Souza, Dheeraj Shah, Harshad KhadilkarAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 176 - 184
Abstract
In the retail industry, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has grown quickly in the last decade and has further accelerated as a result of movement restrictions during the pandemic. While working with logistics and retail industry business collaborators, we found that the cost of delivery of products from the most opportune node in the supply chain (a quantity called the cost-to-serve or CTS) is a key challenge. In this paper, we formally define CTS as a decision-making problem. We then focus on the specific subproblem of delivering multiple products in arbitrary quantities from any warehouse to the customer doorstep. We find that a reinforcement learning (RL) formulation is able to exceed the performance of the state of the art rule based policies, while being significantly faster than traditional optimisation approaches such as mixed-integer linear programming. We hypothesise that scaling up the RL based methodology will have a significant impact on the operating margins of retailers in the ‘new normal’.
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Index Terms
- Learning to Minimize Cost to Serve for Multi-Node Multi-Product Order Fulfilment in Electronic Commerce
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January 2023
357 pages
ISBN:9781450397971
DOI:10.1145/3570991
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Published: 04 January 2023
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CODS-COMAD 2023
CODS-COMAD 2023: 6th Joint International Conference on Data Science & Management of Data (10th ACM IKDD CODS and 28th COMAD)
January 4 - 7, 2023
Mumbai, India
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View all- Dai BXiao TLiu YLi F(2024)A Profit Allocation Mechanism for Multiple-Channels Order Fulfillment System of an E-Retailers AllianceSage Open10.1177/2158244024130078114:4Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
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