Optimising the Order Picking Process: The Case of a Retail Distribution Company in Italy

A correct warehouse management is a key activity for an enterprise; among the involved processes, there is the order picking management, that includes the withdrawn of items ordered by customers, their packing, and shipment. In this paper the order picking problem is modelled as a variant of the vehicle routing problem: picking points can be viewed as customers to be visited, while trolleys handled by operators can be seen as vehicles. The proposed model has been defined in such a way to represent the specific scenario of an Italian retail distribution company. A preliminary computational study on real-based instances is carried out. Numerical results show that the implemented methods outperform the strategy currently applied by the company.