The Study Of Last Mile Delivery Services Based On The Theory Of Pooling

With the rapid development of e-commerce in C hina and consumers personalized demand, which leads to enterprises collect orders with strong heterogeneity. Faced with a large number of heterogeneous orders, How to accomplish the last mile delivery is the key problem for e-commerce companies to gain competitive advantage. In the e-commerce environment, the last mile delivery is essentially to solve the contradiction between dispersed customer demands and scale centralized logistics. However, lots of enterprises use decentralized home delivery, resulting operating with inefficient, slow response and high cost.Based on the background as mentioned above, this thesis studies the location-routing problem in the terminals node of distribution system under the era of e-commerce based on the concept of pooling. Firstly this thesis reviews the literature on the Pooling theory and the problem of last mile delivery, summarizes terminal distribution characteristics. Secondly, according to the customer characteristics, this thesis designs a new terminal distribution model with functions of home delivery and consumer pick-up pattern. Thirdly, this thesis compares between the traditional decentralized terminal distribution and centralized terminal distribution in terms of cost. And finds centralized terminal distribution can improve home delivery cost, the penalty cost when customer chooses self-reference and fixed construction cost of the terminals nodes. It is also found that the improvement of cost increases with the increase of the number of enterprises. Fourthly, considering the difference between customers, this paper proposes a location-routing model based on customer satisfaction and distribution cost. Finally, this thesis validates the model through a numerical example, and discusses the theoretical and practical significance.