Issue: 2025/Vol.35/No.3, Pages
PROPOSAL OF A NEW METAHEURISTIC FOR THE PICKER'S ROUTE DESIGNATION IN WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT
Krzysztof Dmytrów
, Andrzej Dudek
This is not yet the definitive version of the paper. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article.
Cite as: K. Dmytrów, A. Dudek. Proposal of a new metaheuristic for the picker's route designation in warehouse management. Operations Research and Decisions 2025: 35(3). DOI 10.37190/ord250303
Abstract
The order picking is the most time- and work-consuming component of total warehouse operations. As travelling takes up the most of the order picking time, reduction of the picker's route length can help decreasing it. The aim of the research is to develop a new routing metaheuristic with the use of R project language for designing the picker's route in warehouse management that will provide better results than other, widely used routing heuristics. We apply the proposed metaheuristic in the classical, picker-to-parts, one-block rectangular warehouse with random storage assignment. We compare the results with the results obtained by its means with the most widely used routing heuristics: s-shape, return and midpoint. We assume the shared storage and various take-out strategies. Locations to be visited were obtained by using the COPRAS (COmplex PRoportial ASsessment) method. The criterion for assessment of applied metaheuristic is the length of the picking route for every take-out strategy. Obtained results indicate that the proposed metaheuristic provided shorter routes as compared with other routing heuristics.
Keywords: warehouse management, order picking, shared storage, multi-criteria decision-making, routing metaheuristic, simulation methods
Received: 12 July 2024 Accepted: 26 January 2025
Published online: 8 February 2025