Order Release Strategies for a Collaborative Order Picking System

A collaborative order picking system (COPS) enables human-robot collaboration by using order pickers for picking and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for transporting load carriers. Owing to the potential performance enhancement compared to a traditional manual order picking system, COPSs are gaining momentum in the retail warehousing sector. This paper proposes order release strategies based on priority and dispatching rules to achieve the best pick rate performance per AMR. A discrete event simulation model is developed to facilitate the evaluation of the proposed strategies. Their effectiveness is demonstrated with the use of real-world data from a case study warehouse. Our computational results show that a COPS using proposed strategies significantly improves the pick rate performance compared to the current practice.