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ORDER PICKING IN CAROUSEL SYSTEMS UNDER THE NEAREST ITEM HEURISTIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2001

N. Litvak ,
I.J.B.F. Adan ,
J. Wessels  and
W.H.M. Zijm
N. Litvak
Affiliation:
EURANDOM, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]
I.J.B.F. Adan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]
J. Wessels
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]
W.H.M. Zijm
Affiliation:
Faculty of Applied Mathematics, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

A carousel is a computer-controlled warehousing system, which is widely used to store small- and medium-sized goods. One of the most important performance characteristics of such systems is the pick time of an order, which mostly depends on the travel time of the carousel. In this article, we consider some reasonable heuristics for order picking. In particular, we establish properties of the Nearest Item (NI) heuristic. This one is frequently used in practice. We derive tight upper bounds for the travel time under the NI heuristic and closed-form expressions for its mean and variance. We also present a simple two-moment approximation for the distribution of the travel time. In addition, we find the mean, variance, and distribution for the number of turns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 135 - 164
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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