HU Xiangpei
Faculty of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
With the development of ecommerce and advanced information technologies, retailing has experienced a revolution. Currently, e-retailing has advantages over traditional retailing in many areas, such as books, music, clothing and electrical appliances. However, fresh produce presents many challenges for e-retailing due to characteristics such as perishability and high-cost logistics, especially in developing countries. In this report, I focus on the farm-to-door delivery for organic vegetables in metropolises of China. In comparison with traditional retailing modes, we present a framework of farm-to-door delivery mode for organic vegetables based on mobile devices and Internet of Things, and then develop a knowledge-based generating system of vehicle routing schemes to deal with the “last mile” difficulty in the fulfillment of the farm-to-door delivery mode. In addition, I briefly introduce our current work, that is, multi-item order fulfillment for large-scale online supermarkets.