What is Probability Matrix

In the supply chain and the planning and control of warehouse processes, the order picking is an aspect critical. Combining customer orders into picking orders to minimize the picking time is known such order batching. Extensive evolutionary algorithms haven been proposed to build better batches for the order picking. The authors think that any algorithm should preserve batches that appear frequently in all members of the population in order to keep track and inherit these characteristics exhibited by the parents to the next generation. However, the traditional evolutionary operators used in current research sometimes lose the characteristics mentioned. In order to describe the characteristics exhibited by the parents as a distribution of the solution space, the authors build a probability model. An acceptable performance using the model proposed is shown against different evolutionary algorithms known in the literature in a series of extensive numerical experiments.