Response Time Analysis of a Two-Class-Based Gravity System in E - Commerce Environment

With the advent of the Internet era, e-commerce has been rapid developed, which for China's logistics industry, is an opportunity, but also a challenge. Due to the development of urbanization, land resources are becoming scarce day by day, and the cost of storage land is rising rapidly. Therefore, enterprises are becoming more and more demanding for the storage system to be compact and intelligent. The development of e-commerce promoted the innovation of modern logistics, at the same time, due to the e-commerce logistics characteristics of information, networked and intelligent, which has brought new challenges to the storage system scale and speed of response. At the same time, the rising cost of warehousing and the rapidity of demand make this challenge even more difficult. The gravity shelves are arranged in a dense way, thereby reducing the occupation of the channel, increasing the storage density, and effectively saving the storage space. This paper is based on the existing gravity shelves, minimizing the response time, considering the constraints of the system fixed size, optimizing the regional boundary dimensions with two-class-based storage system, exploring the influence factors of the optimal system size and the regional boundary dimensions, then providing several suggestions for practical application. We perform a sensitivity analysis by varying the ABC curve, system size and first zone size. The results show that for most case an optimal two-class-based storage outperform random storage, with up to 43.42% shorter expected retrieval time. The final goal of this study is to provide practical suggestions for the faster and better use of e-commerce warehousing logistics on the basis of classification.