Practice Summary: Cainiao Optimizes the Fulfillment Routes of Parcels
Biao Yuan, Zengde Deng, Na Geng, Yujie Chen, Haoyuan Hu · INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics · 2023
Cainiao collaborates with thousands of logistics partners to provide the most cost- and time-efficient delivery services. In this work, we develop a decision support system to select good fulfillment routes consisting of partners for newly created parcels. The system’s core optimization component contains a proportion algorithm based on solving an offline integer programming problem and an online algorithm based on dual values of the associated linear programming relaxation. The company has implemented the system to transport numerous parcels from China to other countries and regions, thus saving millions of dollars annually. History: This paper was refereed.