Abstract
The Order Processing in Picking Workstations is a real problem derived from the industry in the context of supply chain management. It looks for an efficient way to process orders arriving to a warehouse by minimizing the number of movements of goods, stored in containers in the warehouse, from their storage location to the processing zone. In this paper, we tackle this real optimization problem by providing a new Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the problem. Due to the NP-Hardness of the problem we have also designed several heuristic procedures, to find high-quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time, which is mandatory for handling real instances. Particularly, the heuristics proposed were combined into a General Variable Neighborhood Search algorithm. Finally, we have performed an extensive experimentation indicating an increased performance of our proposals (ILP and heuristic) over previous approaches in the state of the art, using both synthetic and real datasets of instances.
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.