Analysis Of Order Picking Strategy Optimization Considering Collaboration

In recent years,with the rapid development of e-commerce,warehouse efficiency has become an important factor affecting the response speed of orders.Of the many operations that affect warehouse efficiency,picking operations account for 60%of workload and at least 40%of time of warehouse operations.Especially in the warehouses that take the picker-to-parts picking method,the picking route is an important index to measure the efficiency of picking operations,which has a particularly prominent impact on warehouse efficiency.Therefore,it has been extensively studied.In the actual picking process,the picker will start picking according to the order arriving,that is,picking by order.Therefore,during the route planning,the pickers who are working in the warehouse at the same time may encounter a situation where the channel can only allow one picker to pick since overlap of the routes.In this case,the solution to the congestion is to wait.Although the picking route planned according to the heuristic strategy is the shortest,adding congestion time may not be the optimal route planning.If consider exchanging part of the order items during picking process among pickers at this time,that is,collaboration,pickers can avoid congestion in time with changing the existing routing planning.In this case,the changing picking route may not be the shortest compared with the picking route planned by the previous heuristic strategy,but the total time may not necessarily increase because of the non-blocking time.Therefore,based on the existing order picking strategy,this paper constructs an order picking route planning model that considers collaboration and designs the corresponding algorithm in order to improve the effectiveness of collaboration strategy.The main contents and results of this paper are as follows.(1)Under the background of manual order picking,considering the impact of blockage on commonly used order picking routes and analyzing how factors ultimately affect the order picking route planning performance by influencing the blockage situation,this paper proposes that order picking efficiency be improved from a new perspective,that is to consider collaboration.(2)An order exchange mechanism among pickers was proposed,and the exchange variable 0 constructed on this basis was added to the order picking route planning model.The order picking route planning model was taken into consideration for collaborative cooperation,and a suitable algorithm was then implemented to solve the problem.The simulation is to use Python to program on the Visual Studio Code.(3)Collaboration strategy is contrasted with S-Shape strategy,Return strategy and Mid-point strategy and achieve good results in both shortening order picking service time and balancing workload with collaboration strategy under the specific parameters.Among them,shortening the order service time average of 38.31%,25.98%and 16.40%and reducing the standard deviation average of 17.80,12.17 and 18.82 in the single-block warehouse,besides,20.17%,17.27%and 18.18%and 38.26,40.84 and 40.85 in the two-block warehouse.Through controlling variables,this paper analyzes the characteristics of collaboration strategy with different factors in single-block and two-block warehouses,and then shows that in many cases,the algorithm has superiority both in shortening order service time and balancing workload.After validating the validity of the collaboration strategy,it expands its scope of application and further enriches the research conclusions.