An integrated approach for order picking and vehicle routing in a B2C e-commerce context

Abstract

B2C e-commerce sales increase annually. New challenges and opportunities for the logistic system are created by the rise of e-commerce. The interrelationship between the order picking and delivery process should not be ignored. Therefore, an order picking problem and a vehicle routing problem with time windows and release dates are integrated in a single optimization problem. Computational experiments show that integration can lead to cost savings of 12% on average.