Document Type

Research Paper

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

This paper looks at the problem of estimating travel distances for rectangular warehouse sections with manual picking. This study was motivated by a real-life case in the food and beverage industry where case picking occurred in a rectangular section of the warehouse In particular, we are interested in estimating the distance travelled by an order picker whose picking route begins and ends at a single depot. One of the assumptions in many distance approximation papers is that any location is equally likely to be picked. However, this assumption is unrealistic in the case of dedicated warehouse layout, where products are located strategically in order to minimize total distance. The frequency of accessing a pick location can be estimated from the order history table of a WMS. This in turn can be translated into the probability of accessing certain locations. Under the simplifying assumption that there is no backtracking in the aisles, we build a probability tree to estimate the distance traveled by the order picker. From a placement point of view, we present three product assignment (or order slotting) heuristics in this paper, namely the North-North, North-South, and Nearest Neighbor heuristics. Our study shows that there is very little variation between the heuristics in terms of travel distance.

Comments

Paper 35

Publication Title

Progress in Material Handling Research: 2012

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