E-Commerce Order Fulfillment Problem with Limited Time Window

Middle-Mile E-Commerce Order Fulfillment In “E-Commerce Order Fulfillment Problem with Limited Time Window,” Zhou, Gümüş, and Miao investigate how online retailers can improve order fulfillment by utilizing the limited fulfillment window in middle-mile logistics. The authors first characterize an optimal policy and then, introduce two simple heuristic approaches for fulfillment decisions based on Lagrangian relaxation. They show that the proposed algorithms are asymptotically optimal when the number of demand locations increases. They also discover that integrating the information about remaining fulfillment windows into the decision-making process can yield additional benefits. Their findings suggest that online retailers can gain a competitive advantage by offering customers options, such as a “two-day fulfillment” service instead of a “same-day fulfillment” service, particularly when faced with limited logistical capacities.