Production decisions in a manufacturing supply chain are no longer driven by manual systems based on instinct and experience. They are regulated interactions between analysts, production managers and their collective manipulation of policies within the production information system. This paper studies the demand behavior in manufacturing supply chains and its relationships to the logic of produ...

Batching jobs in a manufacturing system is a very common policy in most industries. Main reasons for batching are avoidance of set ups and/or facilitation of material handling. Examples of batch-wise production systems are ovens found in aircraft industry and in semiconductor manufacturing. Starting from the early nineties much research efforts have been put in constructing strategies for the d...

In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of a multicast technique, called controlled CIWP, for supplying video-on-demand services. Similar to batching schemes, controlled CIWP allows two clients that request the same video to share a channel. Unlike batching, the controlled CIWP scheme does not delay the earlier request in order to promote sharing. Instead, sharing is ensured by p...

In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of a multicast technique, called controlled CIWP, for supplying video-on-demand services. Similar to batching schemes, controlled CIWP allows two clients that request the same video to share a channel. Unlike batching, the controlled CIWP scheme does not delay the earlier request in order to promote sharing. Instead, sharing is ensured by p...

In manual order picking systems, order pickers walk or ride through a distribution warehouse in order to collect items requested by (internal or external) customers. In order to perform these operations efficiently, it is usually required that customer orders are combined into (more substantial) picking orders of limited size. The Order Batching Problem considered in this paper deals with the q...

In this work we introduce a Genetic Algorithm (GA) for the Order Batching Problem considering traversal and return routing policies. The proposed GA has been tested on randomly generated instances and compared with the wellknown savings algorithm. According to our extensive computational experiments we can say that the proposed GA yields promising solutions in acceptable computation times.

Order batching is one of the methods used in warehouses to minimize the travel distance of pickers. In this paper, we focus on developing order-batching methods for an order-picking warehouse with two cross aisles and an I/O point at one of its corners. Each of these methods is made up of one seed-order selection rule and one accompanying-order selection rule. Eleven seed-order selection rules ...

Up to 50 per cent of all warehouse operations costs can be attributed to order picking [1]. It is an aspect critical to each supply chain and the planning and control of warehouse processes. According to experience from logistics environments, a reduction of picking times is an integral part of the delivery lead-time and may result in an improvement of the customer service provided by a warehou...

Order picking is a warehouse function that deals with the retrieval of articles from their storage locations in order to satisfy certain customer demands. Combining several single customer orders into one (more substantial) picking order can increase the efficiency of warehouse operations. The Order Batching Problem considered in this paper deals with the question of how different customer orde...

We present a new solution approach for short-term planning of batch production, which decomposes the problem into batching and batch scheduling. Batching converts the primary requirements for products into individual batches. We formulate the batching problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear program, which can be solved by standard software. Batch scheduling allocates the batches to scarce resource...