A Tabu Search Approach for a Material Picking Problem of Assembly Factory

Abstract

Along with the development in global trade supply chain management faces the challenge of not only reducing the cost and ensuring the service performance Responding customers’ requirement rapidly is also an important task Manual order picking is a labor intensive progress which takes more than half of the supply chain cost and is regarded as the bottle neck in supply chain management With the purpose of reducing picking time this research presents a tabu search algorithm to solve the order picking problem which takes into consideration the feature in a real-life assembly factory’s warehouse operation Transform this order picking problem into a multi-trip vehicle routing problem including capacity constraint time limit in single route skill constraint limited machine number and combining the demand order Takes into account that the pickers should not operate the same machine at the same time Computational experiments are performed on 8 realistic instances Compares to the original picking way the total picking time saves 50 52% on average Modify the constraints to the same with Chiu (2018)’ s research the improvement rate in total picking time is 9 65% The results achieve the main object of this research which reduces the total picking time and enables manager to deliver order more efficient

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Ching-Chih Chang (Supervisor)