Collaborative Research: Non-Traditional Designs for Order Picking Warehouses

该合作研究奖的目的是调查设计支持订单挑选操作的仓库的新方法，在这种操作中，工人访问多个地点来建立客户订单。这些设计将允许挑选通道和交叉通道具有多种配置和角度，这与目前的做法有很大不同，即挑选通道是平行的，交叉通道与挑选通道是垂直的。仓库设计将表示为数组中的实数编码，这允许轻松操作。这项研究的一个重大挑战是，在给定设计的情况下，估计检索随机顺序的预期行程距离。将制定一个分两个阶段的过程，包括一个“粗略的”元模型和一个更详细的、基于模拟的模型。搜索空间将用粒子群算法进行探索。如果研究成功，所开发的方法可以用于批发和零售配送中心，以降低与检索客户订单相关的人力成本。据估计，仅美国公司每年就在订单挑选劳动力成本上花费约130亿美元。即使这一成本降低了很小的百分比，也可能带来巨大的经济效益。此外，这项研究的结果将通过一个可供学生、研究人员和从业者使用的交互式仓库设计网站进行推广。这项研究还将通过让学生参观现有的仓库设施，以及分发可在课堂上使用或通过网络分发的教学模块来传播。

The objective of this collaborative research award is to investigate new methods for designing warehouses that support order picking operations, in which workers visit many locations to build a customer order. The designs will permit picking aisles and cross aisles to take on a number of configurations and angles, which is quite different from current practice, in which picking aisles are parallel and cross aisles are orthogonal to the picking aisles. Warehouse designs will be represented as an encoding of real numbers in an array, which allows for easy manipulation. A significant challenge of the research is to estimate the expected travel distance to retrieve a random order, given a design. A two-stage process will be developed, consisting of a "rough cut" meta-model and a more detailed, simulation-based model. The search space will be explored with particle swarm optimization.If the research is successful, the methods developed could be used by wholesale and retail distribution centers to reduce labor costs associated with retrieving customer orders. It is estimated that U.S. firms alone spend approximately $13B annually on order picking labor costs. Even a small percentage reduction in this cost could lead to significant economic benefit. Moreover, results of this research will be promoted through an interactive warehouse design website that could be used by students, researchers, and practitioners. The research will also be disseminated by involving students in a tour of existing warehouse facilities, and by distributing teaching modules that can be used in classrooms or distributed over the Web.