Optimal and Order-optimal Gated Priority-based Greedy Policies for Two-layer Multi-item Order Fulfillment

ArXi:2605.25888v1 Announce Type: new We study how an e-commerce firm should make real-time fulfillment decisions in a two-layer distribution network when multi-item customer orders arrive sequentially and future demand is unknown. The central managerial tension is whether to use scarce front distribution center (FDC) inventory to save current fulfillment cost or preserve that inventory for future orders that may be valuable to serve locally.