基於公平性的物流調度方法研究 (以鋼鐵出廠為例)

Abstract

Outbound Logistics in Steel Mill is the typical traditional logistics industry. Nowadays, more and more steel manufacturers outsource their outbound logistics services to the professional third party logistics enterprises. With the progress of Internet and technology, all the node companies of the supply chain involve deeper and deeper cooperation, leading to a huge change in the logistics industry: professional and specialized third party logistics enterprises are making large advancement towards “platform” and “intellectualization”. “Platform” means that those logistics enterprises need to make full use of social logistics resources, especially to encourage a large number of personal trucks to join the platform, directly providing high quality logistics service to the customers. In order to realize the sustainable operation of platform, logistics enterprises are faced with lots of problems, of which the most significant one is to achieve the fairness of logistics flatten scheduling process.
During the survey of the fairness of logistics scheduling process, the author found out that there exist many unfair cases in outbound logistics process. Those unfair cases not only caused much difficulty to company management, but also resulted in the frequent resignations of the truck drivers who felt being treated unfairly. After numbers of in-depth interviews and research, the author summarized the characteristics and the whole process of steel outbound logistics, then the author described the issue of unfairness and focused on the significance of the unfairness existed in steel logistics scheduling process. By digging into the key factors that caused the unfairness, the author found out that whether the transport task is “good” or “bad” causes the fairness of the work. Thus, how to measure the fairness of every transport task is the first step to solve the issue of unfairness. In the survey with a large number of questionnaires, the author came to realize that the truck drivers focus on the different income brought by different transport tasks, with the same working hours. So the author came up with three variables: the efficiency of the transport task the efficiency of the truck driver, and the efficiency of whole transport tasks, to measure every transport task and show their distribution among truck drivers. In addition, the author used three common evaluation indicators, Jain’s Fairness Index, Entropy-based Fairness Evaluation and Gini Coefficient to build the logistics scheduling fairness evaluation model.
Scientifically and reasonably arranging the goods to be delivered and dispatching the trucks for transportation are the two important parts of logistics scheduling. Therefore, we need to use scientific and reasonable methods to assign every transport task to reduce the unfairness of logistics scheduling. This paper refers to the procedural fairness and outcome fairness of the fairness theory, combining the practice of the logistics scheduling process of H Company. As a result, the author came up with a two-stage logistics scheduling method based on fairness. To be specific, we need to divide the whole logistics scheduling work into two stages, stowage planning stage and tasks assigning stage. The first stage is the stowage planning stage, during which all the transport tasks need to be planned well for the next stage. The second stage is tasks assigning stage, during which all the transport tasks need to be fairly assigned among truck drivers. The author did the empirical analyses for both of the two stages, using the case of H Company. For the stowage planning stage, the model with balance-based constraints and the improved genetic algorithm is proposed. For the tasks assigning stage, the author put forward the fairest method to assign every transport task based on the mathematical model and specifically explained the procedures of the task assigning process.
At the last part of this paper, the author simulated the four different conditions using the two-stage logistics scheduling method, based on two different stowage planning methods and two different tasks assigning methods. What’s more, the author calculated the fairness indicator of logistics scheduling process by the efficiency of truck drivers and the efficiency of all transport tasks. The results showed that the two-step logistics scheduling method raised in this paper can improve quite a lot the fairness of the logistics scheduling process. The outcome in this paper has been proved and well applied in the case of H Company, not only preparing the basis of the platform operation and the scientific management methods to H Company, but also giving some positive insight to modern logistics enterprises.

Date of Award	24 Aug 2016
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Gang HAO (Supervisor)