Title: Locating warehouses shared by retailers for fast-fashion products considering consumers' waiting cost

Authors: Zhi-Hua Hu; Jing-Jing Hu

Addresses: Logistics Research Center, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 200135, China ' Logistics Research Center, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 200135, China

Abstract: This study formulates a strategy based on warehouses shared among retailers for fast-fashion products retailing. Consumers can try fashion products' samples at retail stores and the requested products are delivered from a nearby warehouse shared by several retailers. However, the consumers' waiting times decrease service satisfaction and still have the risk that consumers return the delivered products. Aiming at the location problems for the shared warehouses, we consider the waiting cost perceived by consumers and the profit as objectives in a multi-objective mixed-integer linear program. The numerical results demonstrate that the minimisation of waiting cost increases the number of shared warehouses and thus the fixed cost for them, and decrease the profit. The waiting cost is greatly affected by traveling times, delivery cost, fixed cost for shared warehouses, and the waiting cost function of time.

Keywords: logistics management; fast fashion; warehouse; retailing; waiting cost.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2021.120627

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.39 No.4, pp.497 - 519

Received: 11 May 2019
Accepted: 21 Dec 2019
Published online: 31 Jan 2022 *

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