We consider an e-commerce retailer who must ship orders from a warehouse to a set of customers with delivery deadlines. As is often the case, the retailer uses a third-party service provider to ensure its distribution. The retailer can enter the supply chain of the service provider at various levels. Entering it at a higher level entails lower sorting costs for the retailer, but higher delivery costs, and longer delivery times. The customer orders arrive at various moments over a rolling planning horizon. This means that the retailer must also make consolidation decisions. We model and solve the static and dynamic cases of this problem. The static case is modeled as an integer linear program and solved by CPLEX. We develop and compare four shipping policies for the dynamic case. Extensive computational results based on real location data from California and Texas are reported.

我们考虑一个电子商务零售商，该零售商必须在交货期限之前将订单从仓库运送到一组客户。通常，零售商使用第三方服务提供商来确保其分发。零售商可以进入各个级别的服务提供商的供应链。较高级别地输入它会使零售商的分类成本降低，但交付成本更高，交付时间更长。客户订单在滚动计划范围内的各个时刻到达。这意味着零售商还必须做出合并决策。我们对这个问题的静态和动态情况进行建模和求解。静态情况被建模为整数线性程序，并由CPLEX解决。我们针对动态案例制定并比较了四种运输政策。