A multi-agent coalition-based approach for order fulfilment in e-commerce

The rapid growth of e-commerce in the recent pandemic is driven by the wide adoption of digitization, extensive use of smartphones, affordable internet services, and the convenience of shopping from anywhere and anytime. Some key indexes for measuring the performance of the e-commerce organization include affordable deals, competitive prices, and efficiency in fulfilling orders while ensuring customer satisfaction. Customer review ratings are one of the significant metrics to measure customer satisfaction, influencing other customers to make purchase decisions. Therefore, favourable customer reviews and ratings of various products presented on e-commerce platforms provide competitive advantages to sellers. Usually, customers placing an order on an e-commerce platform are notified about the estimated delivery date. Consequently, after receiving the product delivery, customers give feedback in the form of review comments and ratings to communicate their satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards the seller. In case of delays in order fulfilment, the customers mostly give negative feedback along with poor ratings, which can affect the seller's reputation, thus impacting future sales. Therefore, the central idea of this research is to adopt a resilient order fulfilment approach by identifying the optimal set of sellers based on fulfilment cost, lead time for fulfilment and review rating score obtained from previous orders. The research work has been divided into three different phases. Firstly, significant constraints associated with an e-commerce fulfilment system have been identified from existing literature. The relationship between the lead time in order fulfilment and review rating score is studied. Finally, a multi-agent coalition-based framework is proposed for generating the Pareto-optimal set of reliable sellers to fulfil an order. Although sellers in an e-commerce marketplace are usually considered competitors of each other, a temporary coalition among the sellers for aggregated order fulfilment can minimize fulfilment costs. The proposed multi-agent coalition-based framework is implemented on real-time data to confirm the findings.