Collaborative Research: Non-Traditional Designs for Order Picking Warehouses

协作研究：订单拣选仓库的非传统设计

• 批准号: 1200567
• 负责人: Alice Smith
• 金额: $ 25.5万
• 依托单位: Auburn University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-05-15 至 2016-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1200567&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Non; Traditional; Designs

The objective of this collaborative research award is to investigate new methods for designing warehouses that support order picking operations, in which workers visit many locations to build a customer order. The designs will permit picking aisles and cross aisles to take on a number of configurations and angles, which is quite different from current practice, in which picking aisles are parallel and cross aisles are orthogonal to the picking aisles. Warehouse designs will be represented as an encoding of real numbers in an array, which allows for easy manipulation. A significant challenge of the research is to estimate the expected travel distance to retrieve a random order, given a design. A two-stage process will be developed, consisting of a "rough cut" meta-model and a more detailed, simulation-based model. The search space will be explored with particle swarm optimization.If the research is successful, the methods developed could be used by wholesale and retail distribution centers to reduce labor costs associated with retrieving customer orders. It is estimated that U.S. firms alone spend approximately $13B annually on order picking labor costs. Even a small percentage reduction in this cost could lead to significant economic benefit. Moreover, results of this research will be promoted through an interactive warehouse design website that could be used by students, researchers, and practitioners. The research will also be disseminated by involving students in a tour of existing warehouse facilities, and by distributing teaching modules that can be used in classrooms or distributed over the Web.

该协作研究奖的目的是调查设计仓库的新方法，这些仓库支持订单采摘操作，在该仓库中，工人访问许多地点以建立客户订单。 这些设计将允许采摘过道和交叉过道进行多种配置和角度，这与当前的练习完全不同，在这种实践中，采摘过道是平行的，并且交叉过道与采摘过道是正交的。 仓库设计将被表示为阵列中实数的编码，从而可以轻松操纵。 该研究的一个重大挑战是估计预期的旅行距离，以检索随机订单的设计。 将开发两个阶段的过程，包括一个“粗切”元模型和更详细的基于模拟的模型。搜索空间将通过粒子群优化探索。如果研究成功，则可以通过批发和零售分销中心使用开发的方法来减少与检索客户订单相关的人工成本。 据估计，仅美国公司每年花费大约13B美元，以选择人工成本。 即使是减少这一成本的一小部分也可能导致巨大的经济利益。 此外，这项研究的结果将通过一个可以由学生，研究人员和从业者使用的交互式仓库设计网站来促进。这项研究还将通过让学生参观现有仓库设施，以及分发可用于教室或网络上分发的教学模块来传播。