Design and control of warehouse order picking: A literature review

Abstract

AND KEYWORDS AbstractOrder picking has long been identified as the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse; the cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total warehouse operating expense. Any underperformance in order picking can lead to unsatisfactory service and high operational cost for its warehouse, and consequently for the whole supply chain. In order to operate efficiently, the orderpicking process needs to be robustly designed and optimally controlled. This paper gives a literature overview on typical decision problems in design and control of manual order-picking processes. We focus on optimal (internal) layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching and zoning. The research in this area has grown rapidly recently. Still, combinations of the above areas have hardly been explored. Order-picking system developments in practice lead to promising new research directions.

A new systematic approach for warehouse management system evaluation

“…The main objective behind a WMS is to monitor the warehouse operations such as movement and storage of materials within an operation and process the associated transactions [10]. Order picking processes [3, 10÷13], packaging processes [8,14], bin-packing processes, demand and supply processes, allocating production [14], transportation [14], and inventory resources [4,14], storage allocation and assignment [1,4,14], stock management [10,14,15], are some important criteria that are considered in the management phase.…”

To Wave or Not to Wave? Order Release Policies for Warehouses with an Automated Sorter

“…This modular approach is more tractable, but also alleviates the need to explicitly model features which tend to be more idiosynchratic such as the layout of the picking area. In other settings, the relationship between batch size, staffing levels and average overall picking rate may also be determined empirically, or through analytical models of the kind developed by Chew and Tang (1999) and Le-Duc and de Koster (2007). We also note that the arrival process in our model is random, which reflects that the actual system is only partially controllable.…”

“…Such buffer is costly because of the corresponding accumulation conveyor equipment and floor space requirements (Russell andMeller 2003, Bradley 2007). Because of the relationship between wave sizes and number of sorter chutes pointed earlier, wave sizes also drive the sorter purchase cost, which can reach several millions of dollars for large facilities (Johnson andLofgren 1994, Hinojosa 1996); -As with any batch processing, waves add a cycle time component to order completion times, which can be an issue in environments with time-sensitive customers such as online retailing (Chew and Tang 1999, Le Duc and de Koster 2007; -The sequential release into the sorter of non-overlapping waves with a number of orders roughly equal to the number of lanes may result in low capacity utilization. This is because the lanes corresponding to completed and/or packed orders cannot be re-assigned until the end of the current wave (Johnson andLofgren 1994 andJohnson 1998).…”

Robust Storage Assignment in Unit-Load Warehouses

“…The operational efficiency of warehouses is crucial to the competence of a supply chain. For excellent reviews of warehouse design and operations, see Van den Berg (1999), de Koster et al (2007, and Gu et al (2007).…”

“…The inverse of COI of a product is called the turnover rate of the product. Thus, this policy is also known as the full turnover policy (de Koster et al 2007, Roodbergen andVis 2009). Mallette and Francis (1972) consider multiple receiving and shipping docks and identify the optimal dedicated storage policy.…”