Joint distribution: service paradigm, key technologies and its application in the context of Chinese express industry

ABSTRACT

To cope with the globalisation of online shopping, ecological environment deterioration and increasing traffic pressure, a novel logistics service paradigm – joint distribution (JD) – for tackling the bottlenecks in operational efficiency, quality of service and environment-friendly development is put forward under online shopping combining with the internet of things, service-oriented technologies and other advanced management methods and tools. Then, the concept of JD is defined under online shopping, the differences among JD, third-party express service system (TESS) and self-built logistics system (SLS) are discussed. JD architecture and typical characteristics and the key technologies for developing a JD service platform (JDSP) are introduced. Four core components, i.e. Management system, optimisation on resource service, operational strategies during the delivery, etc. are studied for developing the JDSP. Finally, we develop some key systems and integrate them into the JDSP, also the platform is applied to a joint distribution alliance, and future research directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban logistics
• joint distribution
• concept
• joint distribution service platform
• sharing economy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on improving this paper, and we are also grateful to other researchers in the team of ‘City Joint Distribution for Online Shopping Logistics’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yandong He http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2354-2673

Fuli Zhou http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4786-8451

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71772100]; the Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Committee [grant number JCYJ20170412171044606]; the Soft Science Research Project in Henan Province from Henan Science and Technology Department [grant number 192400410016]; and the Scientific Research Starting Fund from Zhengzhou University of Light Industry [grant number 0140/13501050042].