Abstract
The Order Processing in Parallel Picking Workstations is an optimization problem that can be found in the industry and is related to the order picking process in a warehouse. The objective of this problem is to minimize the number of movements of goods within a warehouse in order to fulfill the demand made by the customers. The goods are originally stored in containers in a storage location and need to be moved to a processing area. The processing area is composed of several identical workstations. We are particularly interested in minimizing the time needed to fulfill all demands, which corresponds to the highest number of container movements to any given workstation. This problem is NP -Hard since it is a generalization of the well-known Order Processing in Picking Workstations which is also known to be NP -Hard. In this paper, we provide a mathematical formulation for the problem and additionally, due to its hardness, we have also developed several heuristic procedures based on Variable Neighborhood Search, to tackle the problem. The proposed methods have been evaluated over different sets 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.