Storage assignment and order batching problem in Kiva mobile fulfilment system

ABSTRACT

This article studies the storage assignment and order batching problem in the Kiva mobile fulfilment system. The storage assignment model aims to decide which product to put in which pod to maximize the product similarity and the order batching model aims to minimize the number of visits of pods. To solve the order batching problem, a heuristic is proposed, where a batch schedule is initialized with the objective of maximizing the order association or minimizing order alienation and improved by variable neighbourhood search. Computational experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed model and algorithm.

KEYWORDS:

• Storage assignment problem
• order batching problem
• product similarity
• Kiva mobile fulfilment system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Changchun Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3269-5009

Lixin Miao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3269-5009

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51705282], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71472108], the Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Committee [grant number JCYJ20160531195231085], and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China [grant number 2014IM010100].