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Balanced Order Batching with Task-Oriented Graph Clustering
Balanced order batching problem (BOBP) arises from the process of warehouse
picking in Cainiao, the largest logistics platform in China. Batching orders
together in the picking process to form a single picking route, reduces travel
distance. The reason for its importance is that order picking is a labor
intensive process and, by using good batching methods, substantial savings can
be obtained. The BOBP is a NP-hard combinational optimization problem and
designing a good problem-specific heuristic under the quasi-real-time system
response requirement is non-trivial. In this paper, rather than designing
heuristics, we propose an end-to-end learning and optimization framework named
Balanced Task-orientated Graph Clustering Network (BTOGCN) to solve the BOBP by
reducing it to balanced graph clustering optimization problem. In BTOGCN, a
task-oriented estimator network is introduced to guide the type-aware
heterogeneous graph clustering networks to find a better clustering result
related to the BOBP objective. Through comprehensive experiments on
single-graph and multi-graphs, we show: 1) our balanced task-oriented graph
clustering network can directly utilize the guidance of target signal and
outperforms the two-stage deep embedding and deep clustering method; 2) our
method obtains an average 4.57m and 0.13m picking distance ("m" is the
abbreviation of the meter (the SI base unit of length)) reduction than the
expert-designed algorithm on single and multi-graph set and has a good
generalization ability to apply in practical scenario.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
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