ORDER CARTONIZATION AND FULFILLMENT CENTER ASSIGNMENT IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY.

Within the retail industry, after customers place orders, their orders are sent to fulfillment centers and their orders are often cartonized on a first-come-first-serve basis. This strategy has the benefit of reducing shipping costs, but it is far from an optimal solution. This paper explores an integrated mathematical model for fulfillment center assignment and simultaneous cartonization. Considering the complexity of the model for larger-scale problems that arise in real-world scenarios, a decoupled model is proposed. Moreover, a fast and effective heuristic, a genetic algorithm with modified two-stage crossover and mutation operators and a simulated annealing with two cooling schedules are also introduced. The results of applying the integrated and decoupled models using the proposed heuristic and metaheuristics are presented for various testing scenarios. The proposed heuristic and metaheuristics are shown to be more efficient when applied to testing instances that are tightly constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]