Order picking in an automatic warehouse: Solving online asymmetric TSPs (Q1304425)

The authors present a joint project with industry that has the aim to sequence transportation request within an automatic storage system in such a way that the overall travel time is minimized. They solve this problem by determining an optimal solution of the asymmetric traveling salesman problem on a directed graph that they have defined. Because the manufacturing environment is such that scheduling decisions have to be made before all jobs are known, it is an online optimization problem. Since the authors consider today's theory of online optimization far from being satisfactory, they decided to use simulation to compare different solution approaches. Based on these comparisons, the authors designed and implemented an optimization package that reduced the unload travel time by about 40\%.