Title of Presentation: The Amazon Fulfillment Network: Topology and Capacity Planning

Abstract:

The Amazon fulfillment network is comprised of Amazon buildings and transportation lanes among them. In this talk, I will focus on the network with nodes representing Amazon Fulfillment Centers, Sortation Centers, and the Delivery Stations, where the links are the truck and air lanes among them. The lanes of this network are highly dynamic: their capacity can be changed a few days in advance, and they can also be deprecated or launched with short notice. On the other hand, large buildings are planned years ahead. Designing and expanding this network, as well as adjusting the nodes and links capacities for everyday operation demands an orchestration of complex OR systems. In this talk, I will describe this process

Bio

Luciana Buriol was a professor in the Computer Science Department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, for fifteen years. Since May 2021 she is a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon, Seattle/USA. Her background is in Computer Science with Ph.D. in the optimization area (State University of Campinas, Brazil, 2003). She was a visitor Ph.D. student for fifteen months at AT&T Labs (USA, 2001-2002), and a postdoc in the Computer Science Department at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy, 2004-2005). She was President of the Latin-Ibero-American Association of Operational Research (2012-2014) and Vice-President of IFORS – International Federation of Operational Research Societies (2016-2018).