Content
This chapter presents the principles and fundamentals of the Picker Routing Problem (PRP) to improve the understanding of warehouse routing problems and solution algorithms. This study describes the main considerations for the PRP, formulation of distance and time matrices between storage positions for 2D and 3D warehouses, and solution approaches. The chapter describes the calculation of time and distance for warehouses considering horizontal and vertical movements through numerical examples. Three algorithms based on genetic algorithms, tabu search, and local search are proposed to solve the PRP, showing variable performance compared to the s-shape routing policy depending on the warehouse configuration and picking list size. The study concludes that distance and time matrices represent convenient tools for practitioners to generate the primary input for PRP solution methods.
Keywords
Distance matrix
Genetic algorithms
Order picking systems
Picker routing problem
Picker-to-part systems
Time matrix