Optimal Delivery Strategy For Freight Platform In Catering B2B Services

With the development of the mobile Internet,traditional small and medium-sized restaurants cooperate with the catering B2B platform to achieve online management of the entire process of procurement.And the catering B2B platform would outsource the delivery service to the freight platform.The catering B2B platform needs to choose an appropriate delivery strategy to reduce the delivery cost and enhance its competitiveness.Meanwhile,the online platform has the ability to process instant information,which enables the platforms to achieve the same-day delivery,so,more distribution strategies are available.Therefore,how to choose an appropriate delivery strategy and whether the same-day delivery service should be realized has become a problem for the catering B2B platform.With the object of minimizing the distribution cost of the catering B2B platform,this thesis studies the delivery problem under different delivery strategies.Three feasible distribution strategies are considered by the catering B2B industry: single day strategy,i.e.optimizing the orders day by day and fulfilling the needs in the next day;two-day strategy,i.e.if there is still time left for the vehicles after delivering all the assigned orders,the vehicles can continue to deliver the order submitted on the day;online strategy,i.e.orders that arrive randomly on the day can be inserted in the origin vehicle routes.In this thesis,the mathematical model of the distribution problem under the single-day strategy is established.Then,the distribution problem under the two-day strategy and online strategy is analyzed and the mathematical model of the two strategies is given.Then the effective algorithms for each strategy are given in the thesis.A suitable initial solution construction method is put forward in single day strategy to ensure the efficiency and quality of the solution.And the updating process of vehicle status and order information is considered in the two-day strategy.In the online strategy,the algorithm is disassembled into three parts including insertion,optimization and information updating.The analysis of small-scale calculation examples based on the real data of M platform verifies the effectiveness of the algorithm.In order to compare and analyze the different strategies,based on the actual business data of the M platform,the calculation examples of different sizes are constructed.Extensive numerical studies sho w that when the number of orders is small,single day strategy is way better than other strategies,the online strategy can make full use of vehicle capacity and minimize the total cost when the size of platform orders is large.Under the current order scale,single day strategy should be adopted by the platform,and the online strategy should be chosen to achieve the same-day delivery service.