Collaborative Research: Non-Traditional Designs for Order Picking Warehouses

这项合作研究奖的目的是研究设计支持订单拣选操作的仓库的新方法，在这种操作中，工人访问许多位置来建立客户订单。 这些设计将允许拣选通道和交叉通道采取多种配置和角度，这与当前的实践有很大不同，在当前的实践中，拣选通道是平行的，而交叉通道与拣选通道正交。 仓库设计将被表示为数组中真实的数字的编码，这允许容易的操作。 该研究的一个重大挑战是估计预期的旅行距离，以检索一个随机顺序，给定的设计。 将制定一个两阶段的进程，包括一个“粗略”的元模型和一个更详细的模拟模型。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，以减少与检索客户订单相关的劳动力成本。 据估计，仅美国公司每年就花费约130亿美元用于订单拣选劳动力成本。 即使是很小的百分比减少，这一成本可能导致显着的经济效益。 此外，这项研究的结果将通过一个交互式仓库设计网站，可供学生，研究人员和从业人员使用。还将通过让学生参观现有仓库设施和分发可在教室使用或通过网络分发的教学模块来传播研究成果。

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.