Wave planning for cart picking in a randomized storage warehouse

Abstract

Randomized storage strategy is known as a best practice for storing books of an online bookstore, it simplifies the order picking strategy as to retrieve books in purchase orders from closest locations of the warehouse. However, to be more responsive to customers, many distribution centers have adopted a just-in-time strategy leading to various value-added activities such as kitting, labelling, product or order assembly, customized packaging, or palletization, all of which must be scheduled and integrated in the order-picking process, and this is known as wave planning. In this study, we present a wave planning mathematical model by simultaneously consider: (1) time window from master of schedule (MOS), (2) random storage stock-keeping units (SKUs), and (3) picker-to-order. A conceptual simulation, along with a simplified example for the proposed wave planning algorithm, has been examined to demonstrate the merits of the idea. The result shows the wave planning module can improve the waiting time for truck loading of packages significantly and can reduce the time that packages are heaping in buffer area. The main contribution of this research is to develop a mixed integer programming model that helps the bookseller to generate optimal wave picking lists for a given time window.