Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning Based on Metapath Aggregation for Emergency Supply Forecasting

Integrated Warehousing and Distribution Supply Networks (IWDSN) have shown their high efficiency in E-commerce. Efficient supply capacity prediction is crucial for logistics systems to maintain the delivery capacity to meet users’ requirements. However, unforeseen events such as extreme weather and public health emergencies pose challenges in supply forecasting. Previous work mainly infers supply optimization based on the invariant topology of logistic networks, neglecting dynamic routing and distinct node effects reacting to emergencies. To address these challenges, the hierarchical relations among warehouses, sorting centers, and delivery stations in logistic networks are necessary to learn the diverse reactions. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical spatio-temporal graph learning model to predict the emergency supply capacity of IWDSN based on micro and macro graphs. The micro graph shows transportation connectivity while the macro graph shows the geographical correlation. Specifically, it consists of three components. (1) For micro graphs, a metapath aggregation strategy is designed to capture dynamic routing information on both route-view and event-view graphs. (2) For macro graphs, a bipartite graph learning approach to extract spatial representations.(3) For spatio-temporal feature fusion, the spatio-temporal joint forecasting module combines the temporal feature from the time-series encoder with hierarchical spatial features to predict the future supply capacity. The extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, which achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with advanced baselines.