Design And Optimize The Order Picking Operations In Distribution Center

Order picking is to pick customer ordered items from storage locator and prepare for shipment.To fulfill an order,the picker walks to storage locations,finds the items,takes out from the locations,consolidates,packs,and prepares for the final shipment.Order picking is the most labor-intensive and costly in all the activities of the distribution center. With the increased customer demand diversity and high service expectations,the research and application of the order picking become one hot topic,in order to increase operation efficiency and decrease the labor workload.This dissertation reviews the current research on the typical decision problems in design and control of order-picking processes.It mainly studies the problems in three kinds of order picking system:static zone order picking system(progressive zone order picking,synchronized zone order picking),dynamic zone order picking and double carousel order picking system.For static zone order picking system,it proposes assignment heuristic algorithms to balance the pickers' workload in different zones by the item location arrangement;considering the order volume fluctuation in peak periods and slack periods,it introduces two heuristic algorithms respectively on historical data.Based on static zone order picking,it brings the dynamic zone order picking strategy by optimizing the picking schedule to share jobs among pickers in one picking lane,two heuristic algorithms are introduced to reduce the total picking time.For double carousel system,in order to minimize the total picking time,it provides the heuristic algorithms to find the optimized picking schedule respectively when picking time can be ignored and when picking time cannot be ignored.Meanwhile,for different picking strategies and optimization objectives,simulated testing is taken to validate its performance and reliability of each algorithm,which provides a reference for the application and the choice of order picking methods.