ON THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CONTAINER PACKING PROBLEM UNDER HOME DELIVERY SERVICE

Abstract

Home delivery service is one of the most important cost drivers in e-commerce industry. We consider the three-dimensional container packing problem under home delivery service, where each rectangular item with its specific destination is loaded orthogonally onto a rectangular container so that the utilization rate of the container space is maximized. In our framework, we assume the routing of a consignment to be given, which turns out that there is an order of unloading items with respect to the consignment. If we load items without considering the order of unloading items, we may unload and reload other unconcerned items drastically while unloading the required item. Therefore, in this paper, the unloading costs for a consignment are precisely defined according to the invisible and untouchable rule, and a subvolume scheme based algorithm is proposed. Our experimental results suggest our approach to be promising.