Scheduling at an auction logistics centre with physical internet

Abstract

Auction logistics centre (ALC) performs transshipment operation on auction products from their inbound-from-supplier transporters to their outbound-to-client transporters with goods trading functions. Major third-party trading service providers have solved technological problems of dealing with millions of simultaneous biddings. But logistics that fulfils the massive and lumpy auction demands in the centre is still challengeable. The lack of process visibility and synchronised schedule has made the congestion on material flow, especially for the trolley loading and auction trading stages. Space resource is wasted and auction products deteriorate as holding time increases. This paper aims to provide a first demonstration of scheduling for auctions of perishable goods using Physical Internet (PI). PI-enabled scheduling is vital to facilitate the decision-making process while ensuring required throughput time with large trading volumes. A PI-ALC is created to automate the flow of information and enable the flexible implementation of scheduling. Following the hybrid flowshop classification, a timely operation scheduling model is developed. A heuristic-based solution approach is proposed to minimise either makespan or value loss using a set of dispatching rules. Simulation experiments show that the dispatching–picking mechanisms have statistically significant interaction impacts on both performance criteria. Decision-makers should strike a balance between minimising makespan and value loss based upon the growth in the frozen buffer size. Finally, the sensitivity analyses justify that schedulers can flexibly select dispatching rules under various demand patterns and operation time windows, as well as system configurations and trolley sizes.

Keywords:

• auction logistics (AL)
• scheduling
• physical Internet (PI)
• modelling
• simulation experiment

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to various companies and organisations which have provided technical and financial support for this research. Authors would like to acknowledge the Zhejiang Provincial, Hangzhou Municipal and Lin’an City governments for partial financial supports. Acknowledgements are also given to HKU small project fund [grant number 201309176013] and National Nature Science Foundation of China [grant number 51305376], [grant number 51405307].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hangzhou Municipal and Lin’an City governments [grant number 201309176013] and National Nature Science Foundation of China [grant number 51305376], [grant number 51405307].