A comparison of heuristics for the problem of batching orders for warehouse selection

Order picking-the selection of items from storage areas to fill cusotmer orders-is the most costly activity in warehouse operations. Among the underlying factors that affect the picking operation is batching customer orders to form picking tours. The paper compares various heuristics for order batching. An important component of the study is comparing various metrics that approximate the relative ‘closeness’ of a pair of orders and provide a quantifiable basis for assigning order to batches. The paper shows, empirically, that one of the proposed solution approaches outperforms the existing incumbent method.