E-commerce information system data analytics by advanced ACO for asymmetric capacitated vehicle delivery routing

• Published in: Information systems and e-business management pp. 1 - 19
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yuan, Yu, Yuan, Lu, Kejing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Springer Nature B.V 01.12.2020
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analytics; Ant colony optimization; Big Data; Business competition; Customer satisfaction; Data analysis; Data management; Electronic commerce; Genetic algorithms; Heuristic methods; Information systems; Logistics; Mathematical analysis; Route planning; Vehicle routing
• ISSN: 1617-9846; 1617-9854
• DOI: 10.1007/s10257-019-00405-y

Logistic industry is experiencing its golden era for development due to its supportive role of electronic commerce operation. Big data retrieved from electronic business information system is becoming one of core competitive enterprise resources. Data analytics is playing a pivotal role to enhance effectiveness and efficiency of operation management. Generally, a well-designed delivery routing plan can reduce logistics cost and improve customer satisfaction for online business to a large extent. According to this, literatures on improvement of delivery efficiency are reviewed in this research. In existing literatures, for instance, ant colony algorithm, genetic algorithm and other combined algorithm are quite popular for such a kind of problem. Even though some algorithms are quite advanced, they are still difficult for implementation due to different constraints and larger-scale of raw electronic commerce data obtained from information system. In this paper, an advanced ant colony algorithm, as a heuristic algorithm, is implemented to optimize planning for an asymmetric capacitated vehicle routing problem. This paper not only emphasizes on ACO algorithm improvement and avoiding premature convergence, but also implementation in a real-world e-commerce delivery, which has more practical meaning for big data analytics and operation management.