Anticipatory shipping versus emergency shipment: data-driven optimal inventory models for online retailers

Xinxin Ren, Yeming Gong, Yacine Rekik and Xianhao Xu

International Journal of Production Research, 2024, vol. 62, issue 7, 2548-2565

Abstract: The inventory levels of pickup points play an important role for the same-day or next-day pickup and delivery services. The previous inventory optimisation research usually makes an assumption about demand distribution, does not use the real dataset or consider shipping strategies for this problem. In this study, we introduce a new strategy, mixture of anticipatory and emergency shipping, and propose forecasting-optimisation integrated approach to optimise multi-items' inventories in each pickup point based on big data analysis. We explore a real dataset including 23,808,261 records with 54 pickup points and 4018 items. We first cluster the dataset based on the distances between pickup points and the warehouse, then, implement the forecasting-optimisation integrated algorithms to select the more profitable strategy for each group. The result indicates that compared with the original algorithms, our proposed approach can effectively increase the profits, particularly, the novel algorithm, Long Short-Term Memory networks – Quantile Regression, performs better. Additionally, we find that the 100% anticipatory shipping is not necessarily superior to emergency shipment, when the pickup point is farther from the warehouse, the advantage of emergency shipment is more significant. However, the mixture of anticipatory and emergency shipping can contribute to higher profits for online retailers.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2023.2219343 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tprsxx:v:62:y:2024:i:7:p:2548-2565

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TPRS20

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2023.2219343

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Research is currently edited by Professor A. Dolgui

More articles in International Journal of Production Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().