An order picking heuristic algorithm for economical packing

Online shopping companies which promise customers to receive their orders within 24 hours in Taiwan or within 6 hours in the same city will have to require a highly supporting and efficient warehouse operation and management system. On the Internet direct orders from customers normally lead to many small orders. This is different from actual selling stores which would normally order large numbers of goods. In shorts, warehouses change from shipping large quantities of goods to shipping large numbers of small quantities of goods. The aim of this research is to extend our previous research, called order picking policy for economical packing in term of re-design and implementation. The current order picking policy for economical packing is a mixed integer nonlinear programming decision model formed to minimize the remaining space of delivering boxes, the picking path of each order, and optimally batching the picking orders. Such a model is not suitable for realization. In this research, order picking policy for economical packing model has been re-designed with a generic algorithm based heuristic. A generic warehouse management system with the proposed order picking function has been conceptually implemented to demonstrate the elimination of storage buffers and the reduction of operation time.