An evaluation of routing policies for order-picking operations in low-level picker-to-part system

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of three routing policies in the order-picking process, i.e. return, traversal, and midpoint policy. It is assumed that items are assigned to storage locations on the basis of the cube-per-order index (COI) rule in a low-level picker-to-part warehousing system. First, for the three policies, analytical models are developed for the total expected travel distance of the order picker considering the number of the stocking aisles is even or odd. Then the developed models are compared with simulation results to show the validity. Finally, the performance of the three policies is examined by varying the parameter value of the COI-based ABC curve, number of picks in the pick list, and ratio of the length to the width of the warehouse.