Integrated Schedule of Order Picking and Delivery for Instant Delivery

In this paper, we introduce an integrated schedule of order picking and delivery for instant delivery. The schedule of order picking, including order batching and picking sequencing, is formulated considering order delivery by depicting orders' location dispersion. The online schedule of order delivery is modeled to minimize the total duration of order fulfillment, which is constrained by orders' picking completion time and the hard time limits of instant delivery. An advanced ant colony algorithm (AN-ACO) is proposed to optimize the schedule of order delivery; it combines ACO and offline-trained attention networks to comprehensively deal with orders' locations and picking completion times. Experiments on 12 simulated instances of difference scales demonstrate that both our online order picking schedule that considers order delivery and AN-ACO for scheduling order delivery outperform existing approaches