The use of bucket brigades in zone order picking systems |
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Authors: | Pyung-Hoi Koo |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Systems Management and Engineering, Pukyong National University, San 100 Yongdang Namgu, Busan, 608-739, South Korea |
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Abstract: | As the transactions through electronic commerce and TV home shopping increase, the warehouses often receive a large amount
of small orders to be picked within tight time windows. One of the important warehousing activities is order picking, the
process of retrieving a number of items from warehouse storage to meet a number of independent customer orders. This paper
examines a new order picking method, bucket brigade order picking (BB picking). Bucket brigade is a way of coordinating workers
who progressively perform a set of operations on a flow line. In the BB picking system, a worker performs operations on an
order until the next worker downstream takes it over; then goes back to the previous worker upstream to take over a new order.
We discuss distinct characteristics in order picking systems when bucket brigades are applied. We identify some efficiency
losses under the BB picking and present a new BB picking protocol to improve the performance of order picking systems. The
new BB picking is compared with the existing BB picking and zone picking through simulation experiments. |
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Keywords: | Warehouse order picking Bucket brigades Zone picking Self-balancing Dynamic assignment |
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