Host: Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics (SOFT)
Recently, the reduction of distribution cost is needed to meet both lower prices and higher quality of the product. The expansions of the Internet mail order system make a demand on warehouses to handle many kinds and small quantity of commodities. The picking operations in the warehouses are therefore depending on humans to be responded flexibly. Main activity of the shipment is picking. Walk time accounts about 52% of the total shipping time, so that selecting an appropriate route in the order-picking contributes the decrease of the work cost. In this study, we construct a working model of order pickers in the warehouses handling for the many kinds and a small quantity of commodities, and we apply the GA to an automatic routing method in order to reduce order-picking tour's timescales. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed method provides results suitable for selecting picking course.
