Designing efficient order picking systems by combining planning problems: State-of-the-art classification and review

Abstract

Warehouses deliver labor-intensive services to customers. Underperformance may result in high costs and unsatisfied customer demand. New market developments force warehouses to handle a large number of orders within tight time windows. To cope with this, order picking operations need to be optimized by solving a wide range of planning problems. Optimizing order picking planning problems sequentially may yield a suboptimal overall warehouse performance. Still, previous warehouse planning reviews focus on individual planning problems. This literature review differs by investigating combinations of multiple order picking planning problems. A state-of-the-art review and classification of the scientific literature investigating combinations of tactical and operational order picking planning problems in picker-to-parts systems is presented with the aim of determining how planning problems are related. Furthermore, this literature review aims to find excellent policy combinations and to provide guidelines how warehouse managers can benefit from combining planning problems, in order to design efficient order picking systems and improve customer service. Combining multiple order picking planning problems results in substantial efficiency benefits, which are required to face new market developments.

Order batching using an approximation for the distance travelled by pickers

“…In this paper we deal with batch picking, where a picker collects all of the products for one or more orders. A very comprehensive state of the art classification and review of picking systems has recently been presented by Van Gils et al [2018b]. They identify 41 papers in the literature concerned with order batching.…”

“…It is clearly of little utility to repeat their work in this paper. As a consequence therefore although we in this section do briefly consider early work our focus is on work that is either additional to that considered in Van Gils et al [2018b], or is of especial relevance to the approach we adopt.…”

“…The situation considered in this paper is often referred to in the literature as a picker-to-parts system, where a picker travels (typically with a trolley) along aisles in a warehouse to retrieve products. As noted in [De Koster et al, 2007, Marchet et al, 2015, Van Gils et al, 2018b such systems are widely used and are believed to constitute a significant majority of all order picking systems.…”

Approach for profiling warehousing activity using customer's order data history.

“…In this way, the decisions at this level should consider the constraints given by the tactical and strategical levels. Some examples of daily decisions in warehousing processes are workforce allocation and job assignment (Van Gils et al, 2018).…”

Order Picking Problem in a Warehouse with Bi-Objective Genetic Algorithm Approach: Case Study

“…The detailed information related to VRP and order picking systems can be found in the studies of Tonci Caric and Gold (2008) and Gils, Ramaekers, Caris and Koster (2017).…”