Order-Picking in a Rectangular Warehouse: A Solvable Case of the Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper addresses the problem of order-picking in a rectangular warehouse that contains crossovers only at the ends of aisles. An algorithm is presented for picking an order in minimum time. The computational effort required is linear in the number of aisles. The procedure has been implemented on a microcomputer A 50-aisle problem requires only about 1 minute to solve.