講座主題：Shall We Only Store Popular Products? Warehouse Assortment Selection for E-Companies
講座時間：2023年10月15日（周日）上午9點
講座地點：經管學院一樓會議室
主講人：劉方，中國科學院大學經濟與管理學院副教授，博士生導師
摘要：This paper studies the single-warehouse assortment selection problem that aims to minimize the order fulfillment cost under the cardinality constraint. We propose two fulfillment-related cost functions corresponding to spillover fulfillment and order-splitting. This problem includes the fill rate maximization problem as a special case. We show that although the objective function is submodular for a broad class of cost functions, the fill rate maximization problem with the largest order size being two is NP-hard. To make the problem tractable to solve, we formulate the general warehouse assortment problem under the two types of cost functions as mixed integer linear programs (MILPs). We also provide a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the problem in polynomial time if orders are non-overlapping. Furthermore, we propose a simple heuristic called the marginal choice indexing (MCI) policy that allows the warehouse to store the most popular products. This policy is easy to compute and hence is scalable to large-size problems. Although the performance of MCI can be arbitrarily bad in some extreme scenarios, we find a general condition under which it is optimal. This condition is satisfied by many multi-purchase choice models. Through extensive numerical experiments on a real-world dataset from RiRiShun Logistics, we find that the MCI policy is surprisingly near-optimal in all the settings we tested. Simply applying the MCI policy, the fill rate is estimated to improve by 9.18% on average compared to the current practice for the local transfer centers (LTCs) on the training data set. More surprisingly, the MCI policy outperforms the MILP optimal solution in 14 out of 25 cases on the test data set, illustrating its robustness against demand fluctuations.
個人簡介：劉方，中國科學院大學經濟管理學院副教授。博士畢業于美國杜克大學Fuqua商學院運營管理方向，本科畢業于北京大學數學學院。主要研究方向有供應鏈管理，機制設計，人道主義救援，可持續發展等。現在承擔百人計劃B項目并曾獲CSAMSE會議best paper award二等獎MSOM data research challenge特獎。論文主要發表在國際頂級期刊UTD期刊Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production Operations Management等。