EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

2616. Enhancing on-time order fulfillment for autonomous order picking and delivery systems of online retailers

Invited abstract in session MD-25: Discrete, continuous or stochastic optimization and control in networks, transportation and design IV, stream Combinatorial Optimization.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 011 (building: 208)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Zhengmin Zhang
School of Mechanical Engineering, Dongguan University of Technology
2. ZHE YUAN
EMLV business school

Abstract

Many online retailers start to fulfill orders within one hour or even minutes to guarantee a good customer experience. This study analyzes the on-time order fulfillment problem for an autonomous order picking and delivery system in online retailers. We draw inspiration from Meituan’s pioneering solution, "Autonomous micro-warehouse and delivery", in which micro-warehouse robots are used for order picking, and delivery robots are used for transporting orders to destinations. We investigate the dynamic priority policy to facilitate efficient task allocation for different order classes, which ensures prompt service for high-priority orders and attentive handling of low-priority orders with extended waiting times.

We develop a dynamic priority-based queueing network to model the system and propose an AMVA-based approximation method to solve it. Numerical experiments validate the analytical model, providing valuable insights into operational efficiency. This paper makes the following contributions: (1) We are among the earliest to investigate autonomous order picking and delivery systems using queueing networks. We propose a new approximation method to solve the proposed nested queueing network with dynamic priority. (2) We outline procedures for determining the optimal numbers of micro-warehouse robots and delivery robots, considering the order fulfillment time requirements. (3) We find that the use of dynamic priority can improve the on-time order fulfillment rate.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers