Two-Stage Warehousing-Distribution Strategy for Central and Pre-Positioned Warehouses with Product Diversity

Recently, the pre-positioned warehouse mode has gained popularity among fresh-product e-commerce, due to its proximity to customers, flexibility, and low operation and maintenance costs. However, product diversity and perishability cause higher inventory and transportation costs, and warehouse and distribution problems hinder the sustainability of the pre-positioned warehouses. This paper considers such key factors as product diversity, food spoilage, and transportation mode and investigates the warehousing and distribution strategy for fresh-product e-commerce’s central warehouse and pre-positioned warehouse. A warehousing and distribution two-stage model for the central warehouse and pre-positioned warehouse is proposed with the objective function, which minimizes the inventory maintenance cost, spoilage cost, and transportation cost, and is solved based on a genetic algorithm. The results serve as a reference for the replenishment and allocation decisions on different product categories in the pre-positioned warehouse mode and centralized purchase decisions at the central warehouse.