Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Volume 61, Issue 7, Pages 2086-2104Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2022.2058433
Keywords
Warehouse management; order picking; zone picking; workload balancing; dynamic programming; heuristics
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This paper investigates the order picker routing problem in a dynamic and synchronised zoning environment, aiming to minimize the maximum time of completing picking activities in any zone. The use of a min-max type objective helps balance the workload of order pickers more effectively.
In both manual and automated warehouses, a combination of efficient zoning and picker routing plays an important role in improving travel time, congestion, and system throughput. This paper considers the order picker routing problem in a dynamic and synchronised zoning environment, where the items corresponding to each customer order are picked simultaneously in multiple zones, and zones may change between different orders. The objective is to minimise the maximum time of completing the picking activities in any zone. Using a min-max type of objective not only minimises the makespan of an order picking wave, but it also helps balance the workload of the order pickers more effectively. We present a mathematical model for the optimal solution of this problem, as well as a dynamic programming approach to find the optimal solution for the case where a zone is a set of adjacent aisles. Computational experiments on randomly generated instances show that the dynamic programming approach is able to find optimal solutions in negligible computational times.
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