Study On Express Operation Network Optimization Design And Competitive Network Equilibrium

With the continuously increasing express services demand of the new type of service industries such as e-commerce and online shopping, express as the fundamental role to service livelihood and production in the social economic development strengthens continuously. Improving express enterprises competitiveness and decreasing social express logistics cost need to improve operation capability of express enterprises, especially optimizing the capability of operation network, and improve the capability of express supply chain. Express operation network optimization design and competitive network equilibrium research is to optimize the backbone transportation network and the fetching and dispatching network, to explore competitive network equilibrium problem of express supply chain composed of transportation enterprises and express enterprises and cosumerconsumer market. The research can be helpful to decrease the cost of express enterprises and optimize express supply chain, and be beneficial to the reduction of operation cost as well as the improvement of competitiveness of the whole industry, and furthermore, enrich and perfect the theories and methods of express operation network optimization and supply chain competitive network equilibrium.Firstly, the article studied express’s whole operation process, by comparison of cost and efficiency of fully-connected express network and hub-and-spoke express network and empirical study on express enterprise, based on multiple allocation hub-and-spoke express network structure, the physical network, organization network and path network of express backbone network were optimized. Secondly, on the basic of customer satisfaction, the scope of application of the different fetching and dispatching modes and the model of determining the adaptation scopes of fetching and dispatching region and the optimization strategies based on the research of customer characteristics were studied. Lastly, through studying on competitive network equilibrium problem of express market, express market competitive network variational inequality model was built. The main content and innovation work are following: (1) The features and optimization objective of operation networks of express enterprises were studied. Through defining the express and describing its characteristics, competition situation and development trend of express market were analyzed. Combined with express enterprises of different ownership, the whole operation process of express enterprises was studied, and the features and optimization objective of operation networks of express enterprises made up of backbone network,distribution network and fetching and dispatching network were analyzed.(2) The selection of express backbone network structure was studied. Cost and efficiency of each link and the whole network of fully-connected express network and hub-and-spoke express network were analyzed. By comparison the influence of parameter variations to cost and efficiency of express service were analyzed, so decisive factor of the selection of express network structure was determined. Then taking an empirical study of an express enterprise, influencing factors of nodes layout and network structure changes were studied and the structure of express backbone network optimization was determined.(3) Through analyzing the union character of express delivering path and based on the network structure of multiple allocation hub-and-spoke network, hub location selection and allocation optimization model of multiple allocation hub-and-spoke express networks was built with the objective function of minimizing the total costs that included sorting costs and transportation costs and transfer costs, with transport time budget constraint. The simulated annealing algorithm based on the conditional shortest path was developed to solve the problem.(4) Through analyzing cost structure of customer cost and express enterprise cost of three fetching and dispatching modes and theirs influence factors, the adaptation scopes of different fetching and dispatching modes were studied, and the model to determine the adaptation scopes of fetching and dispatching region was built with door-to-door fetching and dispatching mode as an example. Meanwhile, decision-making characteristics of consumer to purchase the product of express were analyzed, and express service was designed on the basic of bus modularity combined with sectional modularity.(5) After analysis on express operation procedures based on the union express transportation organization plan, express enterprises behavior and consumer behavior and transport enterprises behavior as well as the equilibrium condition in express competitive market, express market competitive network equilibrium model was built by variational inequality method. A modified projection algorithm was designed to solve this model, and by analyzing the multiple parameters, influencing factors of express price were concluded and ways to lower express price and to improve the market competitiveness of express enterprise were proposed.