2019/09/01 by Albert H. Schrotenboer, Schrotenboer, Albert H., Susanne Wruck +5
Engineering · #90C06 #Advanced Manufacturing and Logistics Optimization #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Assembly Line Balancing Optimization #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Optimization and Packing Problems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.01794
openalex publication_date 2019/09/01 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In picker-to-parts warehouses, order picking is a cost- and labor-intensive\noperation that must be designed efficiently. It comprises the construction of\norder batches and the associated order picker routes, and the assignment and\nsequencing of those batches to multiple order pickers. The ever-increasing\ncompetitiveness among e-commerce companies has made the joint optimization of\nthis order picking process inevitable. Inspired by the large number of product\nreturns and the many but small-sized customer orders, we address a new\nintegrated order picking process problem. We integrate the restocking of\nreturned products into regular order picking routes and we allow for the\ndecomposition of customer orders so that multiple batches may contain products\nfrom the same customer order. We thereby generalize the existing models on\norder picking processing. We provide Mixed Integer Programming (MIP)\nformulations and a tailored adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic that,\namongst others, exploits these MIPs. We propose a new set of practically-sized\nbenchmark instances, consisting of up to 5547 to be picked products and 2491 to\nbe restocked products. On those large-scale instances, we show that integrating\nthe restocking of returned products into regular order picker routes results in\ncost-savings of 10 to 15%. Allowing for the decomposition of the customer\norders' products results in cost savings of up to 44% compared to not allowing\nthis. Finally, we show that on average cost-savings of 17.4% can be obtained by\nusing our ALNS instead of heuristics typically used in practice.\n