An evaluation of several combinations of routing and storage location assignment policies for the order batching problem

In this work, we address the Order Batching Problem (OBP) and we devise tailor-made Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations of the OBP considering composite, largest gap and optimum routing policies, for the first time. We also introduce a novel picker routing policy named as mixed policy which combines the properties of both midpoint and return routing policies. Then, we perform extensive computational experiments with MILP formulations of the OBP considering several combinations of routing and storage policies under different operating conditions on randomly generated test instances. Finally, we present several managerial insights based on the computational results.