An enhanced Modelling approach for warehouse sharing platform system designing problem

Abstract

With the increasing importance of sustainability, warehouse sharing arises as a possible way to improve the logistics system efficiency. This paper studied the warehouse sharing platform systems (WSPS) and proposed an enhanced modelling approach for the WSPS design problem (WSPSDP) using the multi-allocation hub location routing problem framework. New elements, such as inter-warehouse transportation and multi-allocation scheme, were considered compared to the existing WSPS model. Then, an adaptive large neighbourhood decomposition search heuristic was applied to solve our problem. Computational experiments were conducted on different-sized instances to compare the WSPS model without inter-warehouse transportation (WSPSDP-WI) and the WSPS model with single-allocation scheme (WSPSDP-SA). The results suggested that our proposed WSPSDP model is more cost-efficient than the existing WSPS models, reducing 15.38% and 1.43% operation costs compared to the WSPSDP-WI and WSPSDP-SA models. Finally, our proposed WSPSDP model also has the potential to promote the utilisation of existing cheap idle warehouses.