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.

该合作研究奖的目的是研究设计支持订单拣选操作的仓库的新方法，在订单拣选操作中，工作人员会访问许多地点来建立客户订单。 这些设计将允许采摘通道和交叉通道呈现多种配置和角度，这与当前的实践截然不同，在当前的实践中，采摘通道是平行的，交叉通道与采摘通道正交。 仓库设计将表示为数组中实数的编码，这样可以轻松操作。 该研究的一个重大挑战是在给定设计的情况下估计检索随机订单的预期行进距离。 将开发一个两阶段过程，包括“粗略”元模型和更详细的基于模拟的模型。将通过粒子群优化来探索搜索空间。如果研究成功，批发和零售配送中心可以使用开发的方法来减少与检索客户订单相关的劳动力成本。 据估计，仅美国公司每年就在订单拣选劳动力成本上花费约 13B 美元。 即使成本减少一小部分也可能带来显着的经济效益。 此外，这项研究的结果将通过一个交互式仓库设计网站进行推广，可供学生、研究人员和从业者使用。该研究还将通过让学生参观现有仓库设施以及分发可在课堂上使用或通过网络分发的教学模块来传播。