interesting that item 2, 3, 4 required 4 days to arrive
are allocated to delivery option three with 3 days SLA,
and by doing this is the minimum-cost delivery plan.
The minimum total cost of sending these six items are
2292.21 with a computational time of 0.23 seconds.
If the items are sent out separately each in one parcel,
the total cost are 2593 (11.6%). If the items are
bundled by the same SLA, for example, items 2, 3, 4
can be bundled together and sent with 4 days service,
the total cost are 2367.45 (3.18%). The percentage of
the reduction in delivery cost of our plan is shown in
bracket.
Table 5: Example one item details.
INDEX SLA WEIGHT VOLUME Bundle
1 3 3.8 0.05 2
2 4 2 0.05 3
3 4 2.2 0.05 1
4 4 14.2 0.14 3
5 2 9.5 0.07 1
6 3 10.25 0.06 2
5.2 Example Two
This example demonstrates the importance of the
second objective functions, once there is a tie on the
delivery cost of different options. As all the items
require the same SLA, it is obvious to bundle all items
and send them with the four days SLA delivery
options. The delivery cost of the bundle with four
days delivery option is 400. However, the delivery
cost of the bundle to be shipped with three days SLA
is also 400, as demonstrated in Figure 4, the bundle
weight is in the bonus zone. With the second
objective function, when optimizing for this objective,
we only consider solutions that would not degrade the
objective values of delivery cost objectives.
Table 6: Example two item details.
INDEX SLA WEIGHT VOLUME Bundle
1 4 1 0.001 1
2 4 1 0.001 1
3 4 1 0.001 1
4 4 1 0.001 1
5.3 Example Three
This example shows an interesting case, where we
can add packing material into the parcel to increase
its weight and get a cheaper deal. The calculated
weight of the bundle is 44kg, corresponding to the
delivery option in Table 1. The delivery cost of the
bundle with 44kg is 1848, while we could add a little
bit weight to the current bundle and push it to the
arbitrage zone as shown in Figure 1. The optimal cost
of the bundle shipment is just above 1710, while we
augmented the parcel weight to just above 45kg. This
optimal cost is also found by solving the MIP problem.
Table 7: Example three item details.
INDEX SLA WEIGHT VOLUME Bundle
1 4 20 0.001 1
2 4 10 0.001 1
3 4 10 0.001 1
4 4 4 0.001 1
6 NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS
The program is applied into one department’s daily
business since earlier this year and achieved around
17% savings on delivery cost every month comparing
to the same time period of last year. The program is
run several times daily and we selected 20 examples
from real life business to demonstrate the benefits of
applying this program. One example is one batch of a
particular day. The ORDERS column is the total
number of orders to be dispatched at that time period
of that day, and OPT_GROUPS column is the optimal
parcel numbers after we bundled shipment. The ratio
column is the bundle ratio, which is calculated as the
number of groups divided by the number of original
orders. The TIME column is the computational time
of the optimization problem.
In Table 8, we selected 20 batches of orders to be
dispatched. The average bundle ratio for this example
by the proposed optimisation program is 0.387. The
average computational time is 1.58 minutes. The
comparison between the new solution approach and
the traditional solution approach is shown in Table 9.
We increased the bundle ratio by 53.6%, which
means we largely reduced the packing time and
efforts for parcels. More importantly, the unit price
for sending those parcels before optimisation is 8.5
and after optimisation is 7, which indicates a 17.49%
reduction in delivery cost.
7 CONCLUSIONS
A telecommunication equipment company sends
spare parts from local hubs to construction sites or
other local hubs in mainland China several times a
day through parcel delivery services. Depending on
the delivery distance, there are various delivery
options such as transportation via air, via road, via