An exact analysis and comparison of manual picker routing heuristics

Abstract

This paper presents exact derivations of the first two moments of the total picking time in a warehouse for four routing heuristics, under the assumption of random storage. The analysis is done for general order size distributions and provides formulas in terms of the probability generating function of the order size distribution. These results are used to investigate differences between routing heuristics, order size distributions and warehouse layouts. In specific, we model a warehouse with $c$ pickers as an M/G/c queue to estimate the average order-lead time.