On solving the order processing in picking workstations

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.

Publication
Optimization Letters
Eduardo García Pardo
Eduardo García Pardo
Associate Professor

Miembro fundador del grupo de investigación GRAFO, cuya línea de investigación principal es el desarrollo de algoritmos para abordar problemas de optimización, temática sobre la que versa la Tesis Doctoral del investigador y en la que se enmarcan sus publicaciones más destacadas.

Abraham Duarte
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.