A tabu search approach to solving the picking routing problem for large- and medium-size distribution centres considering the availability of inventory and K heterogeneous material handling equipment

Abstract

This paper formulates and solves the picking routing problem for large- and medium-size distribution centres (DCs) considering a set of n products to be collected from m storage locations given a level of inventory and a fleet of heterogeneous material handling equipment. The problem is solved using a generic tabu search (TS) and two hybrid variations of the TS, called TS 2-Opt Insertion and 2-Opt Exchange. This paper makes a contribution to the scientific literature by modelling the availability of inventory and considering the existence of a fleet of heterogeneous material handling equipment in the problem. Numerical experiments were analysed with the split plot design, which made it possible to validate the problem and study the performance of the developed metaheuristics. In addition, a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing were implemented as benchmark to assess the performance of the proposed hybrid tabu search metaheuristics. The statistical analysis showed that TS 2-Opt Insertion provided better performance than a generic tabu search, TS 2-Opt Exchange, a generic genetic algorithm (benchmark) and simulated annealing outperforming them by between 1% and 9.12%.