Order batching in a bucket brigade order picking system considering picker blocking

Soondo Hong (), Andrew Johnson and Brett A. Peters ()
Additional contact information
Soondo Hong: Pusan National University
Brett A. Peters: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2016, vol. 28, issue 3, No 3, 425-441

Abstract: Abstract Bucket brigade order picking improves operational productivity by balancing workloads among pickers with a minimal level of managerial planning and oversight. However, due to variability and uncertainty of the pick locations within a particular order or batch, pickers can encounter blocking delays and thus lose productivity. This study formulates a model to quantify blocking delays and develops a control model to reduce blocking in bucket brigade order picking systems. The Indexed Batching Model for Bucket brigades (IBMB) has indexed batching constraints for generating batch alternatives, bucket brigade picker blocking constraints for quantifying blocking delay, and release-time updating constraints for progressively connecting the batching results with blocking quantification. The IBMB minimizes total retrieval time and improves picker utilization from 2 to 9 % across diverse and practical order picking situations while maintaining the static Work-In-Process. We note that modeling the separation of retrieved batches into orders still remains a challenge.

Keywords: Bucket brigade order picking; Picker blocking; Mixed Integer Programming; (Dynamic) Control model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10696-015-9223-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:flsman:v:28:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s10696-015-9223-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10696

DOI: 10.1007/s10696-015-9223-5

Access Statistics for this article

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal is currently edited by Hans Günther

More articles in Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().