Abstract
Advances in information and communication technologies have made possible the emergence of new shopping channels. The so-called ‘omnichannel’ retailing mode allows customers to shop for products online and receive them at home. This paper focuses on the omnichannel delivery concept for the retailing industry, which addresses the replenishment of a set of retail stores and the direct shipment of the products to customers within an integrated vehicle routing formulation. Due to its NP-Hardness, a constructive heuristic, which is extended into a biased-randomized heuristic and which is embedded into a multi-start procedure, is introduced for solving the large-sized instances of the problem. Next, the problem is enriched by considering a more realistic scenario in which travel times are modeled as random variables. For dealing with the stochastic version of the problem, a simheuristic algorithm is proposed. A series of computational experiments contribute to illustrate how our simheuristic can provide reliable and low-cost solutions under uncertain conditions.
Highlights
IntroductionPeople are changing their shopping behavior. Recent advances in information and communication technologies have introduced new shopping channels and models, which make possible the expansion of e-commerce and, the emergence of new challenges in operational research, transportation, and logistics areas
Today, people are changing their shopping behavior
While the biased-randomized algorithm with local search (BRLH) is guided by a single parameter, β, the simheuristic approach is controlled by the maximum running time timemax, the acceptance margin of worst solutions m, and the number, qshort and qlong, of simulation repeats in short and long simulation runs, respectively
Summary
People are changing their shopping behavior. Recent advances in information and communication technologies have introduced new shopping channels and models, which make possible the expansion of e-commerce and, the emergence of new challenges in operational research, transportation, and logistics areas. With e-commerce, customers are immersed in an environment of a plethora of information, opinions, and access to a vast combined supply of stock, which together allows them to browse through different stores in an online environment. The online shopping channels were predicted to kill off the physical ones. They co-exist and have completely transformed the way customers shop nowadays [2]. The use of a variety of shopping channels is referred to as ’omnichannel retailing,‘ where, instead of having only the single option of physically visiting a store to buy products, consumers can buy them via online
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