Designing and Optimizing Warehouse Picking Processes

The goal of our work was to develop and test a tool for designing and optimizing warehouse picking process.

We created a custom AGV. We defined several processes; the most important are a process that calculates real-time products scheduling, based on the availability of workers and pallet positions in the storage, and a process that simulates the workers’ activities.

Also we applied symbols to the objects, downloaded from Google 3D Warehouse and created custom symbols using Google SketchUp tool. Finally we conducted an experiment design varying four factors, the AGVs load and unload time, the number of AGVs and the worker’s picking time, each one in two levels and then we measured the effects on the mean hourly worker picks.

As the analysis of the results show, this tool is sensible and responds correctly to parameters variation, therefore it can be used to support decision-making in the design of picking processes.