MULTI-CRITERIA SCHEDULING OF ORDER PICKING PROCESSES WITH SIMULATION OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

In profit-oriented environments, such as warehousing in the automotive industry and its suppliers, the minimization of labour costs, and thus the flexibility of labour force is an increasingly important issue. Such an operating policy requires effective capacity planning methods to determine the number of personnel and equipment per activity and scheduling procedures to define the sequence of tasks by considering their strict deadlines. In the following, the use of a discrete event simulation model for multi-criteria scheduling optimization of order picking activities in an automotive parts warehouse with genetic algorithm (GA) is presented. The operative planning system consists of a database, a discrete event simulation model, an application for capacity estimation and a scheduling algorithm. The system was designed to support operative warehouse management personnel in order to pick process scheduling and planning.