Order Picking System Based on Social Network

Lianhong Ding¹, & Peng Shi², & Bingwu Liu¹

¹Information School, Beijing Wuzi University, No.1 Fuhe Street, Tongzhou District, Beijing, 101149, P.R. China, e-mail: lhdingbwu@sina.com.

²Science Center of Material Service Safety, University of Science and Technology Beijing,

No.30 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, P.R.China

Order picking is the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every distribution center. Any underperformance in order picking can bring unsatisfactory service and high operating expense for its warehouse or logistics center, and consequently for the whole supply chain. Storage assignment methods, (internal) layout design and routing methods are three typical decision problems in design and control of order-picking processes. Recently, the research in these areas has grown rapidly, but combinations of the above areas have hardly been explored.

This paper proposes an approach to promote the performance of the order-picking process by reducing the travel time in each order-picking process. Firstly, the patterns of customer requests or order are discovered, and consequently the items which may appear in one order with higher probability. Social network and community detection are introduced into the discovery process: a social network which describes the relationships between items is constructed and the community structures in the network are found by a graphic analysis method. Secondly, the store strategy which can sharply decrease the average tour length in each order picking process is promoted. The principle followed by the store strategy above is that the items, which will be picked in one order with higher probability, should be stored closely in the warehouse. Thirdly, an internal layout design is put forward, which not only suites to the storage assignment above but also takes the turnover and weight of items into consideration. Fourthly, the algorithm which determines the concrete routing path under the given environment is given.

This approach combines efficient order-picking with the research of store strategy, layout design and routing method. It increases the efficiency of the picking work by minimizing the travel distance in each picking process, it can bring great improvement to operation performance.