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With the rapid development of e-commerce, express delivery industry has been in a rapid development stage. Various multimedia and Internet technologies also have fueled strong cravings for express delivery industry information within our culture (Hazlewood & Coyle, 2009). It has become one of the fastest growing industries in the world, especially in developing countries. According to statistics obtained from the China Post, the volume of express business reached 40.06 billion in 2017, which was an increase of 28% over the previous year (Duan, Song, Qu, Dong, & Xu, 2019). It then reached 507.1 billion in 2018, which was an increase of 26.6% over the previous year (Duan, Song, Qu, Dong, & Xu, 2019). In fact, the express delivery industry has maintained its rapid growth in many countries. The cost of global express deliveries, excluding pickup, linehaul, and sorting, is about EUR 70 billion, with China, Germany, and the United States accounting for more than 40% of the market (Duan et al., 2019). It is forecasted that delivery volumes in Germany and the U.S. could double over the next ten years (until 2025), reaching roughly 5 billion and 25 billion parcels per year, respectively (Joerss, Schröder, Neuhaus, Klink, & Mann, 2016). The rapid development of e-commerce not only brings the express delivery industry unprecedented opportunities, but also many new problems and challenges. At present, the “last kilometer” distribution used by the express delivery industry poses a problem of how to deliver an increasing volume of goods to customer clusters in a timely manner and at a low cost (He, Wang, Lin, Zhou, & Zhou, 2017). The implementation of an express terminal network with a joint distribution mode is an effective way to solve this problem. The joint distribution mode, which refers to the distribution behavior organized and implemented by more than one enterprise, originated in Japan in the 1960s. With this mode, less business from a single enterprise is centrally distributed. This mode improves the utilization rate of the vehicles used for deliveries, and breaks the restriction of distributions by individual enterprises (He et al., 2017; Sun, Karwan, Banu, & Pinto, 2015; Wang et al., 2017). However, information sharing can cause privacy and security problems. Yamin et al. (2018) focus on this problem and introduce an approach based on the concept of cooperation between peers (P2P), facilitated by cache. This is not the main research content of this paper, but it should also be paid attention to.
Prior to implementing joint distribution, express delivery companies usually choose where to set express terminal nodes according to their own business. Therefore, it is ubiquitous that some express delivery companies repeatedly set nodes to compete with each other maliciously. This brings such problems as redundant number of nodes, low resource utilization rates for nodes, unreasonable node layouts, and high distribution cost (Ji, Yang, Zhang, & Zhong, 2013). Owing to the previously mentioned problems, it is necessary to integrate optimized express terminal nodes from many express delivery companies in the same region to implement the joint distribution mode more efficiently. Sharing of logistics resources can be realized by integration. With the joint distribution mode, the optimization and integration of express terminal nodes is considered in order to reset the express terminal shared nodes by revoking and merging nodes. This process also redistributes business between the nodes and customer clusters when the supply of nodes set by different express delivery companies in the same region is greater than the demand of customer clusters. Hence, the optimized integration of express terminal nodes can improve the utilization rate of logistics resources and reduce the operation cost of express terminal nodes.