Establishing an Extendable Benchmarking Framework for E-Fulfillment

Abstract

The growth in attended home deliveries motivates research in prescriptive analytics for e-fulfillment. Introducing new analytics solutions, for instance, for vehicle routing or revenue management, requires simulation-based benchmarking and analyses on relevant problem scenarios. Unfortunately, creating the required systems induces high overhead for analytics researchers. This paper introduces the simulation-based benchmarking framework SiLFul, which aims to support scientific rigor and practical relevance of research by reducing this overhead. It provides a toolbox of approaches, a modular and extendable architecture, and a comprehensive, application-related data model. Thereby, it facilitates controllable analyses and transparent and replicable research. Moreover, we propose a research process that leverages the framework for evaluating analytics and allows continuous development of the framework as a community effort.