Title: New order-picking routing heuristics for single block rectangular warehouse

Authors: Hala Ahmed; Mahassen Khater; Raafat Elshaer

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt ' Industrial Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt ' Industrial Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt

Abstract: Order picking is the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse. This paper has two main objectives: first, to propose two new routing heuristics for order-picking in a rectangular warehouse, Ascending and Ascending+, and second, to investigate the impact of order region on the performance of routing heuristics. Four experiments based on dividing the warehouse into 12 main regions and large numbers of randomly generated test problems are designed to validate the proposed heuristics' performance. The computational results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the ascending+ heuristic compared to the performance of the previously published heuristics. The statistical analysis reveals the significant impact of the order region on the performance of the routing heuristics. Therefore, each order region is allocated to the best-performed heuristic.

Keywords: order picking heuristics; warehouse; logistics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2024.136415

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2024 Vol.46 No.2, pp.238 - 258

Received: 30 Jun 2021
Accepted: 29 May 2022
Published online: 01 Feb 2024 *

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