Intelligent service capacity allocation for cross-border-E-commerce related third-party-forwarding logistics operations: A deep learning approach

Shuyun Ren, Tsan-Ming Choi, Ka-Man Lee and Lei Lin

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2020, vol. 134, issue C

Abstract: With the rise of “cross-border-e-commerce”, the third-party-forwarding-logistics (3PFL) service becomes increasingly popular. Different from the traditional third-party-logistics (3PL) service, the 3PFL company provides forwarding services cost-effectively by consolidating orders from different e-tailers/platforms. The random arrivals of orders create a big challenge. Different from most of the existing studies, a deep learning based one-step integration optimal decision making approach S2SCL(Seq2Seq based CNN-LSTM) is proposed in this paper which intelligently integrates inventory optimization and demand-forecasting process. The Seq2Seq based forecasting architecture, which integrates CNN and LSTM network, is able to model the system dynamics and dependency-relations in varying demand for logistics services. Besides generating the point forecasting results, the proposed approach can quantify demand uncertainty via a dynamic distribution and make optimal decision on logistics service capacity allocation. Through a case-study analysis with real data obtained from a 3PFL company in China’s Great Bay Area, we compare the proposed S2SCL with two benchmark models, including a one-step statistics based integration approach ARIMA and a two-step optimization based approach PSO-ELM, for two tasks: (1) point forecasting and (2) optimal logistic service capacity (LSC) allocation. Experimental results show that S2SCL outperforms the two benchmark models in both tasks significantly.

Keywords: Cross-border e-commerce; Multi-product newsvendor; Logistics service capacity (LSC) allocation; Third-party forwarding logistics (3PFL); Deep learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2019.101834

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