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Managing Delivery Networks: A Use Case For Graph Databases

Filipe Peliz Pinto Teixeira on October 30, 2019

At takealot.com one of the biggest competitive advantages we have as an e-commerce platform is the maintenance and expansion of our own logistics n...
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Matti Airas

Just out of interest - are all your transports modeled independently? What if you had one site sharing e.g. outbound capacity with multiple edges, or if you had a single last-mile transport deliver to multiple locations? What would be your preferred way for modeling such shared capacities?

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Filipe Peliz Pinto Teixeira • Edited

are all your transports modeled independently?

Types of transports and their capacity are, i.e. trucks vs scooters vs cars.

What if you had one site sharing e.g. outbound capacity with multiple edges [...]

We model this via what we call a "Satellite" Hub. A satellite hub represents different physical delivery capacity to different areas but from the same physical "Main" hub. This complicates the temporal calculations a bit but we have found a convention which works.

The article actually contains an example of this in the picture - "BRANCH-GAR" is a Main Hub and "BRANCH-SEA" is a Satellite hub. They deliver to different areas with different fleets.

That make sense Matt?

P.S. Good question, that was one of the first hurdles when we sat down to model this.

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Balachandar-Ganesan

Can you share the complete model?.