Lecture Schedule: 10:00-11:00 am, October 13, 2021
Location：Lecture Hall, Second Conference Room, 4th Floor, Building A, Economic Management Building
Abstract: In order to stay competitive in a dynamic business environment full of uncertainties, e-commerce warehouse operations nowadays need lower delivery costs, shorter customer response times, and higher customer service. Thus, a better understanding of the impact of uncertainties that occur in warehouse processes can contribute to the success of any supply chain. Order picking, the process of retrieving customer orders from their storage locations, is the most critical operation in a warehouse. One of the most popular conveyor-based picker-to-parts order picking methods used in practice is zone picking. In this talk we model the various elements of the system including conveyor merges as a network of queues with multiple order classes, with capacity constraints on subnetworks, and with the dynamic block-and-recirculate protocol. The resulting models are most suitable to support rapid and optimal design of complex zone picking systems. As such, they provide a valuable tool for determining the number and length of zones, input and output buffer capacities, and storage allocation of products to zones, in order to meet prespecified performance targets
Reporter: Jelmer Pier van der Gaast
