Order picking along a crane-supplied pick face: The SKU switching problem

This paper treats an order picking system where a crane continuously relocates stock keeping units (SKUs) in a high-bay rack subdivided into the bottommost picking level and the upper reserve area. The capacity of the pick face is not large enough to store all SKUs, so that the crane has to ensure that all SKUs demanded by a current picking order are timely provided and picker idle time is avoided. We aim at a processing sequence of picking orders and a SKU switching plan, i.e., an instruction when to exchange which SKUs in the picking level, such that an unobstructed order picking is enabled. Our problem is closely related to the tool switching problem of flexible manufacturing. Here, each job requires a subset of tools to be loaded into the tool magazine (with limited capacity) of a single flexible machine. We, however, show that an alternative objective function, i.e., minimizing the maximum number of switches between any successive job pair, is better suited in the warehouse context and even better results can be obtained by a multi-objective approach. Elementary complexity proofs as well as suited solution procedures are provided and we also address managerial aspects, such as the sizing of the pick face.