Ant Colony System on E-Commerce Delivery Model

Flowing by the advance of technology and the innovation, the internet has become more and more developed. Nowadays, people have changed their life and consumption patterns. We don’t have to go and purchase in the physical stores but shopping on the internet by our computer or cell phone easily. These changes promoted the development of B2C e-commerce. Many enterprises competing to propose different strategies in order to get B2C e-commerce market. Wherein the delivery strategy, timeliness will play an indispensable role other than cost. How to deliver goods to the hands of customers accurately in the specified time is a sticking point. The purpose of this study is to establish a decision-making system which can help B2C e-commerce enterprise to decide the facility location, number of facilities, the number of vehicle required and delivery route rapidly under the premise of the time limit enterprise proposed without spending a lot of cost. In the earlier literature, the location routing problem associated with B2C e-commerce commonly used traditional algorithm as the method of solving or spend too much time during the process. Therefore, this study uses a two-stage model and modify the multiple ant colony system for vehicle routing problem with time windows(MACS-VRPTW)and propose a new heuristic algorithm to solve facility location problem and vehicle routing problem respectively and also minimize the distribution cost. At last, the study draws data from the well-known B2C e-commerce enterprise and import in the heuristic algorithm which proposed in this study to explore the impact on the facility location, number of facilities, the number of vehicle required and delivery route by different combinations of parameters. The findings in this study can provide the managers a reference to develop its own decision-making system or setting strategies.