Prioritizing Order Picking from Storage and Transferring to Production Department Based on a New Mathematical Model and Multi-objective Meta-heuristic Algorithms

Warehouses are used in many factories from the moment of receiving raw materials to the moment of transmitting final products. In this paper, a bi-objective mathematical model is proposed for order picking problem in warehouses and delivery of orders to production/assembly lines. The first considered objective is to minimize the total cost of order picking in warehouse, and the second objective is to minimize the average tardiness of delivering orders to production/assembly lines.The proposed model is a mixed integer linear programming problem. Since the under study problem is proved in literature to be a NP-Hard problem, two multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithms are proposed entitled non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), and nondominated ranking genetic algorithm (NRGA). Since the optimality of solutions for meta-heuristic algorithms depends on the parameters of algorithms, the Taguchi method is utilized to tune the parameters of algorithms. Finally, computational results from solving different numerical examples with different sizes illustrate the performance of the proposed method.