Intra-Logistics Optimization in a Complex Warehouse
Speaker
Prof. Ulrich Pferschy, Graz University
When
Tuesday, Sept 26nd at 10:00 PM
Where
Department of Engineering
Section of Computer Science and Automation
Via della Vasca Navale, 79
Laboratorio Reti di Calcolatori (room 2.10b)
Abstract
We consider the warehouse logistics system of Blue Tomato, a sporting goods and apparel sales company with a strong e-commerce business. We focus on the order picking process in its central warehouse where every day articles for a few thousand orders are manually picked from the shelves. This is done by human pickers, who use a cart to store a limited number of orders. The resulting planning task consists of two parts: At first, the orders have to be partitioned into batches allowing an efficient picking tour in the warehouse. Secondly, for each batch a routing problem for the picker has to be solved, which can be modelled as an instance of a TSP on a special graph. The warehouse has several non-standard features which require a specialized algorithmic approach. Our framework yields a significant improvement on the total tour lengths of 34.4% on average.
