讲座内容简介
The rapid growth of e-commerce has significantly expanded product variety, intensifying the challenge of efficient order fulfillment. To enable fast delivery, e-retailers strategically position front-end warehouses near customers. However, these warehouses operate under strict capacity constraints, making assortment selection a critical decision in minimizing fulfillment costs. Ideally, each customer order can be fulfilled entirely from a single front-end warehouse. Otherwise, reliance on back-end support increases operational costs, carbon emissions, and delivery lead times, ultimately degrading service quality. In this work, we propose a scalable and flexible heuristic for warehouse assortment selection in both single- and multi-warehouse settings. The heuristic accommodates diverse warehouse- and order-specific cost structures while providing rigorous performance guarantees. Specifically, we establish that its fulfillment cost remains within a constant factor of the optimal solution, where the approximation ratio depends on the largest order size when fulfillment costs are uniform, and on cost disparities across warehouses when fulfillment costs vary. Extensive numerical experiments further demonstrate that the proposed heuristic consistently outperforms existing methods across both single- and multi-warehouse settings.
讲座嘉宾简介: Fang Liu is currently a professor in Operations Management at the Durham University Business School, Durham University. She received her PhD in Operations Management from Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Her paper has appeared in Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. She is the winner of 2022 M&SOM data-driven competition and the finalist of IFORS Prize for Development 2023.
The rapid growth of e-commerce has significantly expanded product variety, intensifying the challenge of efficient order fulfillment. To enable fast delivery, e-retailers strategically position front-end warehouses near customers. However, these warehouses operate under strict capacity constraints, making assortment selection a critical decision in minimizing fulfillment costs. Ideally, each customer order can be fulfilled entirely from a single front-end warehouse. Otherwise, reliance on back-end support increases operational costs, carbon emissions, and delivery lead times, ultimately degrading service quality. In this work, we propose a scalable and flexible heuristic for warehouse assortment selection in both single- and multi-warehouse settings. The heuristic accommodates diverse warehouse- and order-specific cost structures while providing rigorous performance guarantees. Specifically, we establish that its fulfillment cost remains within a constant factor of the optimal solution, where the approximation ratio depends on the largest order size when fulfillment costs are uniform, and on cost disparities across warehouses when fulfillment costs vary. Extensive numerical experiments further demonstrate that the proposed heuristic consistently outperforms existing methods across both single- and multi-warehouse settings.
讲座嘉宾简介: Fang Liu is currently a professor in Operations Management at the Durham University Business School, Durham University. She received her PhD in Operations Management from Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Her paper has appeared in Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. She is the winner of 2022 M&SOM data-driven competition and the finalist of IFORS Prize for Development 2023.
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