Sequencing Picking And Returning Orders In Order To Minimize Traveling Cost

Abstract

In the e-commerce market nowadays, customers usually require a quick response to their orders even though on the busiest days. Basically, warehouse usually apply the “First in, first out” rules. In fact, there are some problems with these rules on e-commerce warehouse which takes more time to go through different locations. As a result, they tend to batch order based on multiple elements. However, some orders are still rejected by consumer for several reasons, for example: wrong orders, missing products, late shipment and broken items, and so on. These orders later returned to the warehouse, and some of them can be resold after rearranging in the rack. This paper presents the batching orders and shortest path problem (travelling salesman problem) using excel to compute raw data, branch and bound with C++ to determine locations in respectively for picking and returning order at the same time after batching to minimize the warehouse cost in practice. Keywords: batching orders; picking and returning problems; sequencing; e-commerce; travelling salesman problem.