Order Picking System Optimization Based on Picker-Robot Collaboration

Distribution centers of E-commerce companies have been under pressure as a result of the development of the Internet and E-commerce technologies. Therefore, the improvement of order picking efficiency and the reduction of logistics cost rely on the optimization of order picking in distribution centers. In this paper, a picker-robot collaboration order picking system has been proposed. The human pickers are assigned to different zones, while the automated guided vehicles (AGVs) pick the orders from different zones. To optimize the collaboration scheme, the mathematical model together with a two-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problems, including order batching, AGV routing and zone scheduling. The case study results have shown the effectiveness and the computation efficiency of the proposed two-stage heuristic algorithm.