Abstract
Nowadays, how to offer extremely fast response to customer orders has become a major challenge for warehouse management, especially in e-commerce. Due to the time urgency aspect of some “VIP” orders that need priority processing, one of the most important issues for logistics distribution centres is how to improve the VIP order-picking priority without reducing the common order-picking efficiency. With this consideration, this article put forward a new priority polling model to describe and analyse this problem. We divide orders into priority and common categories according to their time urgency. A mathematical model is established for such a system by applying polling theory, a probability generating function, and an embedded Markov chain. Numerical analysis shows that this priority polling-based picking system can improve the picking efficiency and is well suited to practical operations.
Highlights
In recent years, China’s e-commerce has developed rapidly
The existing polling systems studies on order picking do not consider the situation in regard to priority orders, whereas in a real situation, some VIP orders need to be prioritized over others. erefore, to solve this problem, we propose a novel combined picking model based on a polling system
We propose an “exhaustive parallel 1-limited” based dynamic order-picking system that is similar to the system of Gong and De Koster [11], which is described as a “dynamic picking system (DPS).”
Summary
China’s e-commerce has developed rapidly. According to data from the China International E-commerce Centre, in 2018, consumers spent more than 9 trillion yuan shopping online, and it is expected that the scale of customers preferring to use online platforms will continue to increase in the future. Scholars have found that the traditional methods do not deal well with the suddenly appearing VIP orders; Kim et al [15] introduced a new inventory replenishment method for an automated picking gantry crane, which allowed the late but priority orders to jump the current queue It was mainly used in short cycle time environments, and they did not consider the fairness of ordinary orders. Under a time-limited control strategy, the machine services the current queue according to time rather than the amount of products [45] This stream of the literature did not consider the situation in regard to VIP orders, while our paper addresses the issue by trading off the picking service for priority orders and ordinary orders
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