A three-phase matheuristic for the Packaging and Shipping Problem

Abstract

E-commerce has been continuously growing in the last years to a primary retail market. Recently in France, the threshold of 1 billion of online transactions was overcome. Due to a high demand uctuation of e-commerce, the workforce sizing for the logistic chain is a challenging problem. Companies have to develop good strategies to have a sustainable workforce size while guaranteeing a high-level service. In this paper, we consider the management of workforce for a warehouse of an ecommerce company. Specically, we address issues as i) How the workforce at the warehouse can be determined; ii) What is the daily operational production planning; iii) How the demand peaks can be smoothed, and the production maintained ideally constant over the time horizon. To provide answers to the issues, we introduce the Packaging and Shipping Problem (PSP). The PSP looks for a solution approach that jointly determines the workforce over a multi-period horizon and daily operational plans while minimizing the total logistics cost. We considered two strategies that aim to enhance the exibility of the process and the eciency of resources use: reassignment and postponement. To tackle the Packaging and Shipping Problem we propose a model, and a three-phase matheuristic. This heuristic proves to be competitive with respect to the direct solution of the model with a commercial solver on real-life based instances.

An Analysis of Research Trends in the Sustainability of Production Planning

“…For example, Satyro et al [48] considered the economic pillar in a holistic production planning approach, whereas Xiao et al [49] integrated the economic and environmental pillars while solving a routing problem. For more details, the 45 articles were classified as follows: 9 articles addressed economic sustainability indicators, 12 articles addressed environmental indicators, and only 1 article addressed social indicators [50], while the remaining 23 articles used integrated indicators of two or more sustainability pillars. Three of these articles used the integration of social, economic, and environmental indicators [2,30,49], while 20 articles used economic and environmental indicators together.…”

“…They introduced a coherence between production planning presented by lot-sizing and preventive maintenance. Customer Satisfaction [53] Scheduling [7] Lot sizing [50] Other [2] Scheduling [49] Routing [16] Hybrid [69] Hybrid [70] Dispatching [71] Scheduling [47] Hybrid [15] Hybrid [72] Hybrid [31] Aggregate production planning [73] Hybrid [74] Hybrid [75] Dispatching [76] Hybrid [77] Hybrid [78] Hybrid [79] Holistic approach [80] Holistic approach [81] Other [82] Scheduling [83] Scheduling [84] Scheduling [85] Other * Hybrid, more than one production planning problem used, and production planning problem combined with other planning processes; ** Other, other planning operations such as energy planning and shipment planning.…”

“…Relatively, as shown in Figure 4, social sustainability is the least addressed sustainability pillar, either as a single objective or integrated with economic and environmental objectives. Cattaruzza, et al [50] introduced a packaging and shipping problem that used production planning, workforce, and demand peaks to achieve the ideal number of employees who could process a set of orders to enhance employee satisfaction and development.…”

“…Regarding the two remaining articles that referred to Germany, one article used the economic objective [56], and the other article integrated the economic and environmental sustainability pillars while using energy planning [81]. In addition, different production planning problems integrated with different sustainability pillars were implemented in several studies and were implemented in many other countries, such as a hybrid production planning model with the environmental pillar Korea [55], and other production planning problems with integrated sustainability pillars in France [50], Italy [70], Turkey [31], and others. China Environmental Hybrid [58] China Environmental Lot sizing [55] Korea Environmental Hybrid [7] Germany Environmental Lot sizing [50] France Social Other [2] Germany Integration (economic, environmental and social) Scheduling [49] China Integration (economic and environmental) Routing [69] China Integration (economic and environmental) Hybrid [70] Italy Integration (economic and environmental) Dispatching [71] Ireland Integration (economic and environmental) Scheduling [31] Turkey Integration (economic, environmental and social) Aggregate P.P.…”