Patent attributes
Method and apparatus for detecting duplicate shipments at one or more materials handling facilities in a distribution system. For each package processed at one or more downstream processing station(s), a destination identifier (customer/address combination) and one or more item identifiers for item(s) in the package may be obtained. An analysis of the obtained data may be performed in accordance with an analysis interval (e.g., thirty minutes or one hour). For every analysis interval, all destination-identifier/item-identifier combinations obtained in the analysis interval may be examined to determine the number of instances each destination-identifier/item-identifier combination occurred in aggregated data (a window, e.g. two weeks or one month of data). The number of destination-identifier/item-identifier combinations that have an occurrence count greater than a specified number may be counted, and if the sum is greater than a specified threshold, an alarm may be raised.
