An Application of Cluster Analysis to Midpoint Routing Policy in Order Batching Process

Order-picking process is one of the major operations in warehouses and distribution centers. In low-level picker-to-part system, picker usually combines orders (order batching) as much as possible so that the can pick a set of the combined orders at the same time. For midpoint routing policy, this paper develops an efficient order-batching algorithm based on cluster analysis. The algorithm is compared with a well known existing algorithm in terms of the total travel time and number of batches grouped. The test results show that the proposed heuristic performs better than the other.