Design of a case-based multi-agent wave picking decision support system for handling e-commerce shipments

Abstract

The emerging trend of e-commerce business poses serious challenges in the field of logistics. To handle e-commerce shipments, warehouses must be able to efficiently handle a large number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), pick and pack small volume orders, and deliver them on time in small parcel shipments to consumers. In this sense, traditional order fulfillment, which encompasses receiving, put-away, picking, and transport through the warehouse, might not be able to fully fulfill the requirements of e-commerce. Considering the fact that order picking in warehouses is one of the most costly activities amongst the logistics operating categories, there is a crucial need to adopt a wave picking strategy to handle e-commerce shipments, an order picking approach that groups the orders for picking at the same time to minimize repeated visits to nearby storage locations. To apply the wave picking strategy properly, decision support for establishing the timing of each wave and the quantity of items to be picked is essential. Therefore, in this paper, a case-based multi-agent wave picking decision support system is proposed to help decision-makers in generating wave picking sequences in order to handle e-commerce shipments, through the integration of case-based reasoning and multi-agent technique. After a pilot study of the proposed system in a third-party logistics service provider, the order-processing efficiency was greatly enhanced.