The price of safety: Order picking in warehouses with in-house traffic regulations

Stefan Bock, Nils Boysen, Rebecca Braken and Tobias Kroll

IISE Transactions, 2025, vol. 57, issue 10, 1230-1244

Abstract: Blue-collar work in warehouses is prone to occupational accidents, especially in large distribution centers where motorized traffic of forklifts, picking carts, and AGVs interfere with human pickers. To improve the safety of these work environments, many warehouses apply specific in-house traffic regulations. Prominent prohibitions include banning U-turns within aisles and left-turns at intersections. Further safety measures are one-way aisles and dedicated traffic lanes prohibiting picks from racks across the oncoming traffic. On the negative side of the safety-performance trade-off, these safety measures reduce routing flexibility and prolong picking tours. We explore the price of safety by integrating different in-house traffic regulations into an exact picker routing algorithm that finds optimal routes within multi-cross-aisle warehouses in polynomial time. We use state-of-the-art TSP solvers for safety measures where this is impossible. Our investigation enables managers to choose the right combination of traffic regulations to improve safety without increasing the picking tour length too much. Our computational results show that a fit of warehouse layout and safety measures is crucial, as they increase the optimal picker tours without restrictions between 3 and 139% on average.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24725854.2024.2434922 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:uiiexx:v:57:y:2025:i:10:p:1230-1244

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uiie20

DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2024.2434922

Access Statistics for this article

IISE Transactions is currently edited by Jianjun Shi

More articles in IISE Transactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().