Order Picking In An Aisle

A classical order picking problem is the case where items have to be picked from both sides of an aisle and the picker cannot reach items on both sides without changing position. Hence the picker must cross the aisle one or more times. An efficient optimal algorithm is developed and shown to yield policies with up to 30% savings in travel time over commonly used policies. It is also shown that, for most practical aisle widths, it is significantly more efficient to pick both sides of the aisle in the same pass (a traversal policy) rather than pick one side and then pick the other side (a return policy) unless the pick densities are greater than 50%. All the algorithms presented here can be implemented in real time on a microcomputer.