Quantifying the impact of sharing resources in a collaborative warehouse

Collaboration in warehousing has the potential to decrease costs and increase supply chain efficiency is therefore popular practice. However, there little literature quantifying benefits of warehouse collaboration. In this paper, we study impact collaboration on two main internal resources warehouse; order pickers dock doors. The setting consider relevant multi-user warehouses, where owner provides facilities services multiple clients depending their needs. We investigate sharing among such a warehouse. present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation, which aims at planning picking shipping process while minimizing total tardiness trucks. use ILP solve non-collaborative collaborative case evaluate performance improvement resulting from collaboration, based operational data retailer. perform computational experiments under varying configurations what circumstances leads highest benefit. find that significant decreasing trucks, mostly come rather than further maximum benefit obtained medium-level resource utilization. Even low levels utilization particular resource, can be by collaborating complementary resources.