Predicting Order Picking Times at a Warehouse

摘要

Customer orders are typically broken into smaller orders (or pick lists) in a warehouse, so that multiple order pickers can travel along the aisles in the warehouse to pick the requested items in the shortest possible time. After the items are picked individually, a pallet might have to be built. The person who builds the pallet is also responsible to verify if the items picked by the order pickers were the ones actually requested. If incorrect items were picked, then the order picker has to re-pick. Consequently, in the order picking process synchronization constraints (i.e. pallet building) and circulation (i.e. re-pick) arise during order fulfillment. The primary objective of this research was to use analytical approximations to predict the time taken to complete a customer order in a warehouse. Existing analytical formulations for estimating flow times in complex manufacturing systems is carefully chosen and applied for the problem under study. Through an experimental study we show that the analytical formulations chosen are good to estimate the time taken to complete a customer order in a warehouse.