An efficient two-stage method for solving the order-picking problem

With the rapid development of online shopping and the expansion of convenience stores in recent years, physical retail stores have successively launched fast online delivery services. To cut costs, hypermarket vendors usually use their existing physical stores as the distribution centers, leading to excessively long total walking distances in the ordering–picking process. In this paper, we propose an online two-stage method to optimize the order picking, specifically, an order batching stage and a picking-path planning stage. The empirical results indicate that the proposed method effectively calculates picking paths and that order pickers efficiently complete their picking tasks by these paths.