Cyber-physical Internet Driven Delivery for Small-Batch Production

Small-batch production usually involves more frequent order and destination changes, and this flexibility makes the product delivery process more complex and unpredictable. Predicting and selecting delivery routes with traditional methods are not flexible enough to cope with the delivery of small-batch production, so it is necessary to establish a new logistics model to integrate the logistics network of small-lot production and improve the efficiency and economic benefits of its delivery. This work introduces the concept of Cyber-physical Internet (CPI) and firstly proposes a general framework and workflow for CPI-driven delivery of small-batch production to integrate the delivery network, as well as the respective operations of the Cyber Layer and Physical Layer in the CPI and the information synergy between them. Secondly, we propose a process to select the optimal LSP as the order carrier through CPI when multiple Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) are in the distribution network. Thirdly, we propose a dynamic routing algorithm for LSP to route CPI-TUs through CPI networks, which can adapt to the dynamic changes of transportation links in CPI networks. Finally, we validated the feasibility of the proposed framework and algorithm through numerical experiments.