For aisle-based order picking systems the travelling times of pickers are crucial to the productivity of the whole system. We consider two aisle routing policies: the graph optimization algorithm (GOA) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) heuristic. ...
For aisle-based order picking systems the travelling times of pickers are crucial to the productivity of the whole system. We consider two aisle routing policies: the graph optimization algorithm (GOA) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) heuristic. The GOA gives an optimal tour but needs to be changed depending on the layout of aisles. On the other hand, the ACO heuristic may not yield optimal tours but turns out to be effective and flexible. Comparing two methods by real data, our ACO heuristic can generate fairly good solutions within a few seconds.