A decision-making method of package consolidation for split orders in online supermarket

With the increasing scale of large-scale online supermarkets, it has to set new warehouse layouts to stock enormous kinds of goods, e.g., multiple warehouses in one city, multiple warehouses in multiple cities. As a result, a customer's order with multiple types of items is separated into several suborders, which are picked and packed in different warehouses, and then delivered to the customer independently. It will bring about some challenges (high cost, high pollution, high disturbance to customers) for green and healthy development of e-commerce. The package consolidation for split orders among multiple warehouses is an important way to solve this problem, and also an urgent task to improve the performance quality of split order fulfillment. This paper aims at the decision-making problem of package consolidation for split orders in large-scale online supermarket. In order to improve the scientificity and efficiency of online generation of package consolidation schemes for split orders, it focuses on decreasing the difficulty of problem solution, synthetically applying the theories of combination optimization and state-space searching. A two-stage online decision-making method of intelligent optimization for split order package consolidation is proposed to solve three key issues of whether split orders can be consolidated and packaged, which warehouses can be selected as package consolidation centers for each order, and which goods can be consolidated and packaged. In the first stage, the main influencing factors of the split order package consolidation are summarized and the decision rules are designed to decide whether to consolidate. In the second stage, for the split orders that need to be consolidated and packaged, the state-space search algorithm is proposed to generate the alternative package consolidation schemes, and the qualitative control strategies are transformed into control rules and incorporated into the scheme generation process, thereby reducing the solution space. Finally, numerical experiments show that the decision-making method of package consolidation can effectively reduce the fulfillment cost of split orders of online supermarket, and the theoretical results can provide a reference for operational activities of online supermarket or other B2C e-commerce enterprises with serious order splitting situation.