Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process for Order Assignment to Affiliated Stores

With the expansion of the electronic commerce (EC) market, individual stores can sell online by affiliating with EC site-operating companies and utilizing a platform developed by those companies. In such organizations, assigning orders to each affiliated store is a challenging task. In this study, we proposed a method for weighting multiple factors when assigning orders using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). We weighted three factors (Health, Scale, and Distance), calculated the comprehensive score of each affiliated store using AHP, and applied it to order assignment. Numerical experiments were conducted in various regions across Japan using real data from a specific company verified the usefulness of the proposed method. The results suggested that the proposed method allows for order assignment considering a wider variety of factors compared to the manual assignment and a previous study.