Abstract
The Online Order Batching Problem with Multiple Pickers (OOBPMP) consists of optimizing the operations related to the picking process of orders in a warehouse, when the picking policy follows an order batching strategy. In this case, this variant of the well-known Order Batching Problem considers the existence of multiple workers in the warehouse and an online arrival of the orders. We study three different objective functions for the problem: minimizing the completion time, minimizing the picking time, and minimizing the differences in the workload among the pickers. We have identified and classified all previous works in the literature for the OOBPMP. Finally, we propose a multistart procedure hybridized with a Variable Neighborhood Descent metaheuristic to handle the problem. We test our proposal over well-known instances previously reported in the literature by empirically comparing the performance of our proposal with previous methods in the state of the art. The statistical tests corroborated the significance of the results obtained.
Eduardo García Pardo
Full Professor
One of the founders of the investigation group GRAFO, whose main line of research is the development of algorithms to tackle optimization problems, the topic of the researcher’s Doctoral Thesis and which their most notable publications are framed.
Abraham Duarte
Full Professor
Abraham Duarte is Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence, and operations research to develop solution methods based on Computational Intelligence (metaheuristics) for practical problems in operations-management areas such as logistics and supply chains, telecommunications, decision-making under uncertainty and optimization of simulated systems.