What is Order Picking

This chapter details the performance evaluation of routing policies and proposes a routing heuristic to determine the minimum traveled distance for different warehouse configurations and pick-list sizes. Numerical experiments are performed considering warehouse configurations used in literature and list sizes are chosen proportional to the number of storage positions of each layout. The proposed heuristic method was shown to reduce the distance traveled by 7% for the evaluated instances. Furthermore, travel distance reductions of up to 30% were found in cases involving large warehouse and pick-list sizes. The proposed heuristic therefore is concluded to provide a more efficient solution than individual routing policies for the picker routing problem.