Design and control of warehouse order picking: A literature review

By René M. B. M. de Koster, Tho Le-Duc, Kees Jan Roodbergen. European Journal of Operational Research, 2006

2,087 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Order picking has long been identified as the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse; the cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total warehouse operating expense. Any underperformance in order picking can lead to unsatisfactory service and high operational cost for the warehouse, and consequently for the whole supply chain. In order to operate efficiently, the order-picking process needs to be robustly designed and optimally controlled. This paper gives a literature overview on typical decision problems in design and control of manual order-picking processes. We focus on optimal (internal) layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching and zoning. The research in this area has grown rapidly recently. Still, combinations of the above areas have hardly been explored. Order-picking system developments in practice lead to promising new research directions.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d482423c1f77da795531fed05046d13c9669704b

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Citations in the corpus

Designing efficient order picking systems by combining planning problems: State-of-the-art classification and review (2017, methodology): “Zone picking (De Koster et al., 2007; Parikh & Meller, 2008) Zone picking policies define the flow of customers order through all order picking zones.”
Warehousing in the e-commerce era: A survey (2019, background): “…Yakuel, 2012; Henn & Wäscher, 2012 ), here all new orders are considered that have arrived during a xed time span, and variable-time-window batching (see, e.g., Leuc & de Koster, 2007; Xu, Liu, Li, & Dong, 2014 ), where batch ormation is triggered whenever a predefined number of orders ave arrived.”
A Review on Industrial Augmented Reality Systems for the Industry 4.0 Shipyard (2018, background): “Note that picking items represents from 55 % to 65 % of the total cost of warehousing operations [75], which are still mostly carried out through a pick-by-paper approach.”
A survey of literature on automated storage and retrieval systems (2009, background): “General overviews of warehouse design and control include Cormier and Gunn (1992), Van den Berg (1999), Rouwenhorst et al. (2000), De Koster et al. (2007) and Gu et al. (2007).”
Big Data in product lifecycle management (2015, background): “zation of storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching, and zoning still waits to be explored [80].”
Operations Research for green logistics - An overview of aspects, issues, contributions and challenges (2011, background): “However, since they reduce the amount of traveling, they are also beneficial for the environment; see for example De Koster et al. (2007), ÐDukic et al. (2010).”
Design and application of Internet of things-based warehouse management system for smart logistics (2018, background): “Among all the operations in the warehouse, research studies found that the order picking process can account for 50–55% of total operating expense (Frazelle and Frazelle 2002; de Koster, Le-Duc, and Roodbergen 2007).”
E-fulfillment and multi-channel distribution - A review (2006, background): “Traditional issues in warehouse design include the selection of a proper storing method, the choice of appropriate handling equipment, and the warehouse layout (de Koster et al. 2006).”