European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515

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European Journal of Operational Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

Discrete Optimization

Picker routing in the mixed-shelves warehouses of e-commerce

retailers
Felix Weidinger a, Nils Boysen a, Michael Schneider b,∗
a
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Lehrstuhl für Operations Management, Carl-Zeiss-Str. 3, 07743 Jena, Germany
b
RWTH Aachen University, Deutsche Post – Chair Optimization of Distribution Networks, Kackertstr. 7, 52072 Aachen, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: E-commerce retailers face the challenge to assemble large numbers of time-critical picking orders, of
Received 29 August 2017 which each typically consists of just a few order lines and low order quantities. To efficiently solve this
Accepted 11 October 2018
task, many warehouses in this segment are organized according to the mixed-shelves paradigm. Incoming
Available online 16 October 2018
unit loads are isolated into single units, which are randomly spread all over the shelves of the warehouse.
Keywords: In such a setting, the probability that a picker always finds a demanded stock keeping unit (SKU) close-by
Facility logistics is high, irrespective of his/her current position in the warehouse. In spite of this organizational adaption,
Warehousing picker routing, i.e., the sequencing of shelf visits when retrieving a set of picking orders, is still an im-
Mixed-shelves portant optimization problem. In a mixed-shelves warehouse, picker routing is much more complex than
Picker routing in traditional environments: Multiple orders are concurrently assembled by each picker, many alternative
depots are available, and items of the same SKU are available in multiple shelves. This paper defines the
resulting picker-routing problem in mixed-shelves warehouses and provides efficient solution methods.
Furthermore, we use the developed methods to explore important managerial aspects. Specifically, we
benchmark mixed-shelves storage against traditional storage policies for scenarios with different ratios
between small-sized and large-sized orders. In this way, we investigate whether mixed-shelves storage is
also a suitable policy if an omni-channel sales strategy is pursued, and large-sized orders of brick-and-
mortar stores as well as small-sized online orders are to be jointly processed by the same warehouse.
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction mortar stores (Brynjolfsson, Hu, & Smith, 2003). Consequently,

When setting up their warehouse operations, e-commerce re-
tailers directly serving final customer demands in the business-to-
consumer (B2C) segment typically face the following challenges:
• Small orders: Private households tend to order rather few items
in low quantities, so that the typical picking order in the B2C
segment consists of just a few order lines, each demanding only
very few items. According to personal communications with a
German Amazon warehouse manager, their average order con-
tains only about 1.6 items.
• Large assortment: The term “long tail” describes the phe-
nomenon that niche products account for a much larger
proportion of sales in e-commerce than they do in brick-and-
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: felix.weidinger@uni-jena.de (F. Weidinger), nils.boysen@uni-
jena.de (N. Boysen), schneider@dpo.rwth-aachen.de (M. Schneider).
URL: http://www.om.uni-jena.de/ (N. Boysen), http://www.dpo.rwth-aachen.de/
(M. Schneider)
most online retailers offer a large assortment.
• Varying workloads: Most online retailers have dynamically
grown over the past years (Laudon & Traver, 2007). Depending
on the offered products, they face highly volatile demands, e.g.,
due to end-of-season sales. Thus, warehouses should be scal-
able to flexibly react to varying workloads.
• Tight delivery schedules: Next-day or even same-day deliver-
ies have become an elementary component of many business
models and supply chains especially in the B2C segment (e.g.
Yaman, Karasan, & Kara, 2012). This narrows the time window
for order picking considerably and puts increasing stress on
warehouse operations.
A warehousing setup specifically designed for these require-
ments is a mixed-shelves warehouse (e.g., Weidinger, 2018). Here,
unit loads are purposefully broken down into single items and ran-
domly spread all over the racks of the warehouse. This storage
policy is also denoted as scattered storage (Weidinger & Boysen,
2018). With stock keeping units (SKUs) being stored all around,
there is a good chance to always have one of the demanded
items close-by, irrespective of where the picker is currently

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2018.10.021
0377-2217/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
502 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
Fig. 1. Basic elements of a mixed-shelves warehouse.
positioned in a warehouse. In this way, the unproductive walk-
ing time of the pickers, which is the main drawback of traditional
picker-to-parts systems (in which unit loads are kept together, e.g.,
de Koster, Le-Duc, & Roodbergen, 2007), is considerably reduced.
This helps to realize the tight delivery schedules of e-commerce.
Moreover, storing a large assortment seems unproblematic as long
as there is enough space for adding shelves to the warehouse. The
standardized and low-tech equipment also facilitates the scalability
in case of varying capacity situations; additional pickers and racks
can simply be added to or removed from a warehouse. Finally, the
small order sizes reduce the chance that a picker has to visit mul-
tiple storage positions to accumulate enough items of a SKU that is
ordered in a larger quantity. This would increase the walking time,
so that care has to be taken that the SKU diversity of the racks fits
the order sizes in a mixed-shelves warehouse.
Mixed-shelves are applied in the European distribution centers
of online retailer Amazon but also by many other warehouses in
the B2C segment (Weidinger & Boysen, 2018).
1.1. Operations in a mixed-shelves warehouse
A typical warehouse setting of B2C online retailers operated un-
der the mixed-shelves policy applies the basic elements depicted
in Fig. 1 and can be described as follows:
The racks for storing items are headhigh to be conveniently ac-
cessible by human pickers, who walk along the aisles while push-
ing small picking carts. A cart carries multiple bins in parallel, each
dedicated to a specific picking order. Due to the small order sizes,
the picking carts—although being small and agile—are still able to
transport up to a handful of bins concurrently. To use space more
efficiently, the racks are often arranged on top of each other in
multi-story mezzanine systems. The SKUs are stored according to
the mixed-shelves policy, so that all items of a SKU are spread all
over the warehouse. To route the workers during order picking,
they carry a small handheld scanner. The integrated display lists
which order line from which storage location is to be retrieved
next. The optimization approach for picker routing that is devel-
oped in this paper can thus be applied to navigate the pickers via
their handhelds. Furthermore, the scanner is used to acknowledge
the retrieval of an item from a shelf and its put-away in a bin.
In this way, the background information system also receives in-
formation on empty storage positions where newly retrieved items
can be restocked.
All around the warehouse, there are multiple access points to a
conveyor system, which moves completed bins towards the pack-
ing stations of the shipping area. Thus, there is not a single central
depot but multiple ones spread all over the warehouse. Next to the
access points, there are stacks of empty bins, which can directly be
loaded onto the cart for initiating the retrieval of subsequent pick-
ing orders.
In this way, the shelves are successively emptied by the pick-
ers, so that refilling the shelves is another important task. Other
than picking, which is executed under great time pressure due to
the tight delivery schedules, refill operations are not (that) time-
critical. At a distribution center we visited, refill operations have
been used to get new employees acquainted with the warehous-
ing processes and to employ redundant workforce during off-peak
hours.
In different real-world applications, the above processes may, of
course, slightly vary. For instance, a pick-by-voice system can di-
rect the pickers and picking carts and mezzanine systems are not
a fixed requirement. Also, each bin filled by a picker is not nec-
essarily used to collect only a single order but can be assigned
to a batch of orders that are jointly picked. Traditionally, batch-
ing is particularly effective if the same SKU is needed for multiple
orders (de Koster et al., 2007). In the packing and shipping area,
however, these batches need to be separated into customer orders
again, e.g., by an automated sorter (Gallien & Weber, 2010; Johnson
& Meller, 2002).
1.2. Decision problems and literature review
The main decision problems to be solved under a mixed-shelves
policy are basically the same as in any other warehouse. Among
the most elementary decisions are (e.g., Bartholdi & Hackman,
2014):
• the storage assignment problem, which assigns SKUs to storage
locations, and
• the picker-routing problem, which determines the routes of the
pickers through the warehouse when retrieving picking orders.
Instead of trying to summarize the vast body of literature which
has accumulated on these topics, we merely refer to the recent
in-depth review papers, e.g., provided by de Koster et al. (2007)
and Gu, Goetschalckx, and McGinnis (2007); Gu, Goetschalckx,
McGinnis (2010). Our focus is on the peculiarities of mixed-shelves
warehouses. In real-world mixed-shelves warehouses, storage
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
assignments are typically not optimized but simply randomly de-
termined (Weidinger & Boysen, 2018). The paper on hand concen-
trates on the latter problem and aims to optimize picker routes in
mixed-shelves warehouses. Compared to traditional picker-routing
problems, where a single order is to be picked from a given set of
storage positions, and each tour starts and ends at a central depot,
the following peculiarities have to be considered:
• Items of the same SKU are available in multiple shelves, so that
an additional selection problem is to be solved. Moreover, or-
der lines requesting multiple items may need to be collected
by visiting multiple storage positions of the respective SKU.
• The picking cart is able to carry multiple bins concurrently, so
that multiple orders are processed in parallel.
• There exist multiple access points to the conveyor system, so
that we have many alternative depots where finished orders
can be handed over, and new orders can be initiated.
Picker routing with alternative pick locations has been consid-
ered by Daniels, Rummel, and Schantz (1998). They solve the re-
sulting problem with facultative distance matrices by a tabu search
procedure. Weidinger (2018) addresses the same problem for rect-
angular warehouses. These warehouses have specially structured
distance matrices, for which the (pure) routing problem is solvable
in polynomial time (Ratliff & Rosenthal, 1983). Integrating alterna-
tive pick locations, however, makes the problem strongly NP-hard
even for rectangular warehouses (Weidinger, 2018), so that simple
myopic selection rules coupled with the efficient routing procedure
of Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983) are applied. However, in both pa-
pers the latter two peculiarities have not been considered. They
assume a single central depot, exclude picking carts and a parallel
processing of multiple orders.
With a single central depot, a picking cart with capacity for
multiple bins leads to a traditional batching problem (de Koster
et al., 2007 for an overview on the literature). In addition to the
routing problem, it has to be decided which orders should be
jointly retrieved in a tour. With multiple access points a picker
may pass some depot anyway, so that some completed order can
be handed over en passant although other orders of the current
batch are not yet completed. Thus, a dynamic batching problem
arises, which (to the best of the authors’ knowledge) has not been
treated in the warehousing literature.
Multiple depots are also rarely considered in the warehous-
ing literature. In a related setting, conveyors run along the cross-
aisles, so that each tour can start and end anywhere in a cross
aisle. De Koster and van der Poort (1998) extend the algorithm of
Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983) to derive optimal routes for rectan-
gular warehouses in polynomial time for such a setting. We, how-
ever, consider a discrete set of depots spread arbitrarily around the
warehouse.
Routing pickers in warehouses shares many similarities with
routing delivery tours of vehicles. Here, our three peculiarities may
be relevant too, so that we briefly summarize related problem set-
tings for extensions of the vehicle-routing problem (VRP) and its
derivatives. A truck has capacity for multiple items anyway and
multiple depots are common in VRPs too (e.g., Montoya-Torres,
Franco, Isaza, Jiménez, & Herazo-Padilla, 2015). However, contrary
to our setting, the depots generally mark the end point of a vehi-
cle route at which all orders are completely fulfilled. A more re-
lated variant are VRPs with intermediate stops (Schneider & Hof,
2015), in which a certain resource can be replenished or unloaded
at so-called intra-route facilities, and thus the capacity of the ve-
hicle with regard to that resource is increased. Examples include
stops for good replenishment at certain intermediate depots or for
waste disposal at intermediate collection sites. Finally, alternative
delivery locations are considered in the generalized VRP (Ghiani
& Improta, 20 0 0): given a partitioning of the customer set, this
503
variant determines cost-minimal routes that serve exactly one cus-
tomer of each subset. All these VRP variants share some similari-
ties, but are not directly applicable to our picker routing problem.
It can be concluded that optimization approaches suited for
picker routing in mixed-shelves warehouses are not yet available.
Note that this result seems especially unsatisfying because of the
extreme time pressure (and the large potential of optimized picker
routes to reduce this pressure) existent in the warehouses of on-
line retailers.
1.3. Contribution and paper structure
This paper treats a rich picker-routing problem, which is rele-
vant in the mixed-shelves warehouses of online retailers. Specif-
ically, the following peculiarities are considered: Multiple orders
are concurrently assembled by a picker, several alternative depots
are available, and items of the same SKU are available in multi-
ple shelves. The resulting problem is defined (Section 2), and effi-
cient solution procedures are introduced (Section 3) and tested in
a comprehensive computational study (Section 4.3). Furthermore,
we address important managerial aspects. A major drawback of
mixed-shelves warehouses is that multiple storage locations have
to be accessed whenever larger order quantities occur that have to
be accumulated from multiple shelves. Therefore, we benchmark
mixed-shelves storage against traditional storage policies for sce-
narios with different ratios between small-sized and large-sized
orders. In this way, we investigate whether mixed-shelves stor-
age is also a suitable policy if an omni-channel sales strategy is
pursued, and large-sized orders of brick-and-mortar stores as well
as small-sized online orders are to be jointly processed by the
same warehouse. This issue is addressed in Section 5 and, finally,
Section 6 concludes the paper.
2. Problem definition
Consider a mixed-shelves warehouse consisting of a set P of
storage positions, each initially storing γ p ≥ 0 items of one SKU
s ∈ S, where S denotes the total SKU set. Without loss of general-
ity, we assume that each storage position stores just a single type
of SKU, which is defined by ηp . If a shelf carries items of multiple
SKUs, then multiple storage positions having zero distance among
each other can be introduced. Furthermore, we have a given set D
of depots (also denoted as access points), where completed picking
orders are handed over to the conveyor system, and empty bins for
new orders are retrieved. In total, we have V = P ∪ D positions in
the warehouse, and the picker’s walking distance among storage
positions and/or depots v and v is denoted by dvv . We consider
a single order picker, whose picking cart can carry up to C bins
concurrently for collecting picking orders. Initially, the picker is lo-
cated at an arbitrary depot. We have a given set of picking orders
O, and aos defines the number of items of SKU s demanded by or-
der o ∈ O.
We aim at a solution defining the picker route through the
warehouse such that all picking orders are retrieved. Specifically,
a solution is represented by a sequence π defining the successive
visits of the picker at positions in V. Each sequence position π i ,
i = 1, . . . , m, is specified by a triple (v, δ, o). We have to distinguish
three cases: If the picker is located at a storage position, i.e., v ∈ P
holds, such a triple defines that during the ith stop the picker re-
trieves δ items of SKU ηv stored at storage position v for order
o. Note that if multiple successive triples all refer to an unaltered
storage position v ∈ P, this means that the picker retrieves SKU ηv
stored at this position for multiple orders currently being active on
his/her cart. Stops do not only refer to storage positions but also to
depots where finished orders are handed over and new orders are
504 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
started. At these positions, i.e., if v ∈ D holds, no items can be re-
trieved, such that we have δ = 0 and o referring to a virtual order
-1. Finally, triple (v, δ, o) at sequence position π 0 refers to the ini-
tial position of the picker, so that v is fixed to the given starting
point of the picker. Given these definitions, we call a solution π
feasible if the following conditions hold:
• An order o is started (handed over) at the depot preceding (suc-
ceeding) the first (last) occurrence of o in the triples of π . Note
that there must always exist one optimal solution for which
this property holds. Starting (finishing) orders at a depot ear-
lier (later) than required cannot improve the solution value be-
cause, in this case, cart capacity is blocked longer than neces-
sary. Therefore, in a feasible solution π , there has to be at least
one depot visit prior and after the first and last occurrence of
each order, respectively. During the time between these two de-
pot visits, we call this order active.
• In each sequence position i = 1, . . . , m of π where a storage po-
sition is visited, we have at most C active orders, so that the
given cart capacity is not exceeded.
• For each order o ∈ O and all SKUs s ∈ S, it must hold that the
number of items aos requested by order o is retrieved while it is
active. Thus, retrieved items δ summed over all triples (v, δ, o )
in π with o = o and ηv = s must equal aos .
• The available stock in each storage position can be depleted but
may not become negative. Thus, for each storage position v ∈ P
retrieved items δ summed over all triples (v , δ, o) in π with
v = v may not exceed the given initial inventory γv .
Among all feasible solutions π , we seek one that minimizes the
length of the picker route, i.e.,

m
F (π ) = dvπi−1 ,vπi ,
i=1
where vπi refers to position v ∈ V being visited during the ith visit
of π . Recall that vπ0 refers to the given start position of the picker.
Our problem definition is based on some (simplifying) assump-
tions, which we elaborate in the following:
• We only consider a single order picker and neglect all interde-
pendencies to other pickers concurrently working in the ware-
house. Thus, pickers are assumed to neither block each other in
front of shelves, in front of depots, or within narrow aisles (e.g.,
Hong, Johnson, & Peters, 2012) nor to influence each other’s
inventory levels. Large warehouses in the B2C segment use a
large number of pickers that work concurrently, so that it will
regularly occur that multiple pickers compete for items. As soon
as a picker has retrieved some items, they are no longer avail-
able for other pickers, who have to sidestep to other shelves.
The coordination of pickers is not part of our research, and we
assume that some preceding planning stage has already dis-
tributed the storage positions and orders among the workers.
It seems a valid task for future research to integrate our (single
picker) approach in a larger framework where it can be applied
to evaluate different distribution plans of shelves among multi-
ple pickers.
• We neglect the interdependency to replenishment operations
(Section 1.1). If stow workers replenish shelves in parallel to the
picking operations, it may occur that additional items become
available after a while. It seems risky to integrate items (and
their exact replenishment times) ahead of their actual place-
ment in a shelf; any delay would result in an invalid picker
tour. Therefore, we assume that items are only considered once
they are finally placed, and the picker is about to start the next
tour.
• All items of a SKU are assumed to be equally valid to sat-
isfy a demand. In warehouses storing perishable goods, dates
of expiry may need to be considered, so that, for instance, the
first-in-first-out rule has to be applied (Akkerman, Farahani, &
Grunow, 2010). This can be easily considered by preselecting
these preferred (urgent) items. Our picker routing approach is
then only allowed to retrieve inventory from these preselected
storage positions.
• We presuppose standardized bins for collecting orders, which
all have equal size. This allows us to measure the picking cart
capacity C in number of bins. Typically, standardized bins are a
prerequisite for a fail-safe transport on picking carts and con-
veyors, so that this should rarely be a shortcoming.
• We restrict ourselves to rectangular warehouses, i.e., single-
deep parallel racks along both sides of an aisle with cross aisles
at the top and bottom. This most basic setup is very common
in the real world. For instance, at a German Amazon warehouse
we visited, the pickers were not allowed to change levels in
the multi-story mezzanine system, and in each level the setup
was rectangular. Moreover, the restriction to rectangular ware-
houses allows us to apply the polynomial time routing algo-
rithm of Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983) for quickly solving an im-
portant subproblem to optimality. If more complex warehouse
settings occur, this algorithm needs to be replaced either by
one of the extensions (de Koster & van der Poort, 1998; Rood-
bergen & de Koster, 2001) still solving the subproblem to op-
timality or by a heuristic (de Koster et al., 2007). However, we
leave an evaluation of these adaptions to future research.
• We follow the most common approach in the warehousing lit-
erature and presuppose that distance minimization is the right
performance criterion for measuring picking performance. As
most other parts of the picker’s time, e.g., the time to retrieve
items from a shelf, are fixed once the pick list is determined,
picker walking is the main factor influencing picker time. Note
that in e-commerce often different priorities and varying dead-
lines have to be considered, which, e.g., vary whether or not
privileged delivery programs have been booked by a customer.
However, assigning each order a specific weight and deadline
implies an unrealistically long planning horizon for picker rout-
ing, e.g., of several hours. We, however, assume a shorter plan-
ning horizon where the (urgent) orders to be processed next
have already been determined on a preceding planning stage.
In such a setting, if a given order set is assembled faster by re-
ducing the travel distances, then it becomes more likely that
the orders’ tight delivery schedules are met. A more detailed
discussion on this matter is provided by de Koster et al. (2007).
Given such a rich routing problem, it is anything but astounding
that (already a quite restricted version of) our mixed-shelves picker
routing (MSPR) turns out to be a complex matter (e.g., Weidinger,
2018).
Theorem 1. MSPR is strongly NP-hard even if only rectangular ware-
houses with a single depot are considered and only a single order is
picked.
The reduction is from the set cover problem, which belongs to
Karp’s famous collection of 21 NP-complete problems (Karp, 1972):
Set cover: Given a set U of n elements and a collection S of sub-
sets from U, is it possible to select exactly k subsets from S, such
that every element in U is contained in at least one of the selected
subsets.
Proof. In our transformation, we introduce n SKUs, |S| aisles, and
a single picking order. An aisle is added to our warehouse for each
subset in S, and we store a single item of those SKUs corresponding
to the elements contained in the respective subset exactly in the
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515 505

Table 1
Notation used in the MSPR-MIP.

S Set of SKUs (index: s)

O Set of orders (index: o)
P Set of storage positions
Ps Set of storage positions holding SKU s
D Set of depots
V Set of positions, with V = P ∪ D (indices: v, v )
m Maximum sequence position (index: i, i = 0, . . . , m)
C Capacity of picking cart
γv Number of items stored at storage position v ∈ P
dvv Distance between positions v and v
aos Quantity of items of SKU s demanded by order o
v0 Initial start position of the picker (with v0 ∈ V )
M Big integer (e.g., M = maxo∈O,s∈S {aos , |O|})
xvi Binary variables: 1, if v is visited at sequence position i; 0 otherwise
δvio Integer variables: quantity of items picked from storage position v at sequence position i for order o
ksio Binary variables: 1, if picking order o starts at sequence position i; 0 otherwise
keio Binary variables: 1, if picking order o ends at sequence position i; 0 otherwise
φvv i (auxiliary) binary variables: 1, if v is direct predecessor of v at sequence position i; 0 otherwise

middle of the respective aisle. Note that items can be stored in dif- one end point. Additionally, picking a specific order can only
ferent levels of a rack, such that the storage positions in the middle start and end at a depot (8), and SKUs can only be picked at
of an aisle can host multiple SKUs. The single order demands a sin- corresponding storage positions (9). Moreover, picking items of
gle unit of each of the n SKUs. Our single depot is located right un- an order is limited to the time span during which the order is
der the leftmost aisle, and if the length of the cross aisle to enter active (10). The capacity of the picker’s cart is considered by
the aisles has length m, then all our aisles have length l > 2 m. The constraints (11) and the auxiliary variable used to linearize the
question we ask is whether a solution with a tour length smaller objective function is set in formulas (12). Constraints (13) and
than (k + 1 ) · l exists. (14) state that the same position cannot be visited twice in a row
As the movement along the cross aisle is smaller than reaching and storage positions are only visited if demand is satisfied during
the middle of an aisle, we only have to choose aisles (subsets) that the visit. The start of the picker tour is set by (15), and, finally, the
altogether cover our order (set U). Thus, the one-to-one mapping domains of the variables are given by (16) and (17).
between the k subsets of set cover to be selected and the k aisles

m
to be visited in MSPR is readily available, and we abstain from a MSPR-MIP Minimize F = φvv i · dvv (1)
more detailed proof.  v∈V v ∈V i=1
subject to
3. Solving the mixed-shelves picker routing problem with  
multiple depots xvi ≤ xv(i−1) ∀i = 1 , . . . , m (2)
v∈V v∈V
In this section, we elaborate on how to solve MSPR. In

Section 3.1, we formulate a mixed-integer program, which allows xv0 ≤ 1 (3)
to solve MSPR with a standard solver. Then, we present heuristic v∈V
solution procedures extending former work on picker routing with
multiple storage locations per SKU. Daniels et al. (1998) were the 
m
first treating picker routing in a mixed-shelves warehouse. Their δvio ≤ γv ∀v ∈ P (4)
solution approach, however, presupposes a single depot and as- o∈O i=0
sumes that only a single order is picked at a time. We adapt their
nearest neighbor approach to our more complex problem setting in 
m

Section 3.2. Afterward (Section 3.3), we develop a more complex δvio = aos ∀o ∈ O; s ∈ S (5)
v∈Ps i=0
pool-based solution procedure extending the work of Weidinger
(2018), in which picker routing with multiple storage locations
per SKU in a rectangular warehouse is addressed, but, again, only 
m
ksio = 1 ∀o ∈ O (6)
a single depot and a single active picking order is assumed. In
i=0
Section 3.4, a local search heuristic is presented, which can be used
to further improve solutions of our construction heuristics. 
m
keio = 1 ∀o ∈ O (7)
3.1. Mixed-integer program i=0

 
Applying the notation summarized in Table 1 MSPR can be for- (ksio + keio ) ≤ M · xvi ∀i = 0, . . . , m (8)
mulated as a mixed-integer problem (called MSPR-MIP) consisting o∈O v∈D
of objective function (1) and constraints (2) to (17).
Objective function (1) minimizes the total length of the picker 
δvio ≤ M · xvi ∀v ∈ V ; i = 1, . . . , m (9)
tour. Constraints (2) and (3) ensure that position visits in the
o∈O
warehouse are properly sequenced. Inequalities (4) take care that
the available stock of items in a shelf is not exceeded during
 
i
order picking, and formulas (5) make sure that customer or- δvio ≤ M · (ksi o − kei o ) ∀o ∈ O, i = 1, . . . , m (10)
ders are satisfied. Since preemption is not allowed, constraints v∈P i =0
(6) and (7) determine that each order has only one start and
506 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515

i 
(ksi o − kei o ) ≤ C ∀i = 1, . . . , m
i =0 o∈O
φvv i + 1 ≥ xv(i−1) + xv i ∀v, v ∈ V, i = 1, . . . , m
xv(i−1) + xvi ≤ 1 ∀v ∈ V, i = 1, . . . , m
 handle a vast assortment of SKUs. Consequently, we apply a con-
xvi ≤ δvio ∀v ∈ P, i = 0, . . . , m
o∈O
xv0 0 = 1
δvio ≥ 0 ∀v ∈ V ; o ∈ O; i = 0, . . . , m
xvi , ksio, keio, φvv i ∈ {0, 1} ∀v, v ∈ V ; o ∈ O; i = 0, . . . , m
Note that our model deviates from our problem definition in
Section 2, where picking at a single storage position for multi-
ple orders is modeled by multiple successive (virtual) visits at the
same position. In the model, picks for several orders during the
same visit are possible due to the δ -variables. Consequently, suc-
cessive visits of the same position are prohibited by constraints
(13) of our model. Even if constraints (13) and (14) are optional
and the same solutions are obtained without them, they reduce
the search space considerably. During preliminary tests employ-
ing our small dataset (Section 4.1), these additional constraints in-
creased the fraction of instances solved to proven optimality from
25% to 99% when applying Gurobi with a time limit of 30 minutes.
Further note that the binary x-variables can easily be eliminated
and replaced by the φ -variables. However, the resulting model, al-
though being much more handy, increases the computational time
of the presented model by a factor of more than seven for our
small dataset. Thus, we abstain from eliminating the x-variables.
3.2. Nearest neighbor heuristic
Our nearest neighbor (NN) heuristic is a straightforward ap-
proach to find a first feasible solution for MSPR. First, picking or-
ders are sequenced according to increasing index, and the first C
orders according to this sequence are activated. As long as not all
active demands are satisfied, the nearest storage position provid-
ing items of a demanded SKU is visited. When having collected all
active demands, the nearest depot is visited and processing of the
next batch of C successive orders starts, until all orders are com-
pleted. A more formal definition of NN is given in Algorithm 1 .
Algorithm 1: Nearest neighbor heuristic.
1 for (i = 1; i ≤ |O|; i += C) do
2 determine demand of active orders
i, i + 1, . . . , min{i + C − 1, |O|};
3 while (not all demand satisfied) do
4 visit nearest storage position containing a not yet
satisfied demand;
5 visit nearest depot to activate new picking orders;
6 return the generated tour;
Note that batching, i.e., deciding which orders should be con-
currently processed on the cart, is a complex matter especially in
a multi-depot warehouse. Picking two orders jointly in a batch may
be advantageous when starting from a specific depot but may turn
out as a pretty bad choice if started from another access point. We
(11) tested several simple decision rules for order batching, but none
of them turned out significantly better than our most basic index-
based approach.
(12)
3.3. Pool-based construction heuristic
(13)
Real-world warehouses of online retailers contain thousands of
SKUs (Section 1), so that we aim at a fast procedure being able to
(14)
struction heuristic, which extends partial solutions in a stepwise
manner. To gain promising solution values with small optimality
gaps, we generate many partial solutions in parallel in each step
(15) and only add the most promising among them to a central pool of
solutions. Furthermore, we apply the efficient algorithm of Ratliff
and Rosenthal (1983) as a subprocedure to determine the optimal
(16)
circular picker tour in a rectangular warehouse once the orders to
be processed and the storage positions to be visited in between
two successive visits at a depot are selected. In the following, we
(17)
sketch the basic idea of our heuristic, which mainly consists of two
hierarchical steps, before we elaborate each step in detail:
• On the upper level, a pool of multiple partial solutions is man-
aged. Starting with an empty tour where the picker is located
in his/her initial position, partial solutions are selected from
the pool and extended in a stepwise manner. In each step of
the lower level, we start at the picker’s current depot, select
a small subset of yet unscheduled orders, schedule them, and
end at the succeeding depot where finished orders are handed
over. This is done λ · μ times by randomly selecting and extend-
ing a partial solution from the pool, where λ and μ are two
parameters defining the search effort. Among all existing and
new partial solutions, the λ most promising ones are kept in
the pool. Once all partial solutions are completed and all or-
ders are scheduled, the best complete solution of the pool is
returned.
• The extension of partial solutions is handled on the lower level
of our heuristic. We receive a partial solution of positions al-
ready visited and orders already processed. This partial solu-
tion is extended up to a specific number of subsequent orders,
which is also set by the upper level. To do so, we first select
the (small) subset of orders to be scheduled next. Note that
some orders may not be completed, so that the picking cart
need not be completely empty when extending a partial so-
lution. For the active orders, we select the respective storage
positions to satisfy the demanded SKUs and determine the best
picker tour along these selected positions by applying the dy-
namic programming procedure of Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983).
Note that this procedure derives an optimal circular tour and,
thus, always returns the picker to the initial depot. In our prob-
lem, however, this needs not be the best choice, so that we
do not necessarily take over the complete solution but check
whether a premature shortcut to another depot seems advis-
able. Based on the work of Weidinger (2018), we apply three
different priority rules for selecting the storage positions to be
visited, so that multiple partial solutions are generated among
which one is returned to the upper level, chosen with a proba-
bility based on the solution quality.
Note that by varying the steering parameters λ and μ, our
pool-based heuristic can easily be adjusted to problem instances
of varying size. In warehouses of the largest size, the dynamic pro-
gramming approach of Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983) applied as a
subprocedure can be substituted by a faster heuristic, e.g., a near-
est neighbor approach or some other routing heuristic (de Koster
et al., 2007), to still get acceptable computational times. Further
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515 507

note that detailed tests on tuning the steering parameters λ and μ

Algorithm 3: Extending a partial solution on the lower level
are reported in Section 4.2.
of the pool-based procedure.
In the following, we describe both levels in more detail and
start with Algorithm 2 of the upper level. In this step, a pool 1 c = randomly selected integer between 1 and
min{|O˜ |, C − |Ǒ|};
2 Oˆ = select c orders of O˜ ;
Algorithm 2: Pool management on the upper level of the 3 determine (remaining) demand of Oˆ and Ǒ;
pool-based procedure. 4 maxLength = 0; List l = new List(); // the new subtours are
1 determine UBF by solving the nearest neighbor heuristic; stored in l
2 define pool, pool  ; // used to save (new) partial 5 foreach (depot vd ) do
solutions 6 foreach (penalty rule ) do
3 pool.Add(new PartialSolution(null)); // picker at start 7 r = randomly drawn double value between 0.0 and 1.0;
position 8 if (vd is picker position ∨ r < |D2 | ) then
4 for (i = C; i ≤ |O|; i += max{1, min{C, |O| − i}}) do 9 π̆ = GenerateSubtour(demand, vd , );
5 pool  .Add(NearestNeighbor(i)); // partial nearest 10 maxLength = max{maxLength, π̆ .Length};
neighbor solution 11 l.Add(π̆ );
6 for ( j = 1; j < λ · μ; j++) do 12 foreach (π̆ in l) do
7 select partial solution π˜ from pool randomly; 13 compute probability for selecting subtour π̆ by
while (π˜ .OrdersP rocessed < i) do
 maxLength−π̆ .Length +1
8
P (π̆ ) =  ;
9 π˜ += new PartialSolution(π˜ ); // generate new π̆  ∈l (maxLength−π̆ .Length+1 )
partial solution 14 select subtour π̆ based on probabilities;
∗

10 if (π˜ .T ourLength < UBF ) then
11 pool  .Add(π˜ );
12 foreach (PartialSolution π˜ in pool ∪ pool  ) do
π˜ .TourLength
(tie-breaker: ππ˜˜ .ItemsPicked
.TourLength
13 rate π˜ by π˜ .OrdersC
omplet ed
14 store exclusively the λ partial solutions with lowest rates
from pool ∪ pool  in pool;
15 return best solution in pool;
of partial solutions is managed. By randomly selecting partial so-
lutions from the pool and handing them over to the lower level,
λ · μ new partial solutions are generated and among all existing
and new partial solutions, the λ most promising ones are kept in
the pool. Pool management is defined in detail by Algorithm 2.
At first, an upper bound UBF is determined by executing the
nearest neighbor heuristic (Section 3.2; line 1). Afterward, the pool
is initialized with an empty partial solution, where the picker has
not picked any orders yet and is located at the starting position of
the tour. Additionally, pool , storing newly generated partial solu-
tions, is defined (lines 2–3).
In each of the following iterations, λ · μ new partial solutions
are generated, which differ from the partial solutions generated
in the previous iteration by C less orders not yet processed. One
of these partial solutions is generated by partially executing the
nearest neighbor approach. The remaining (λ · μ ) − 1 solutions are
constructed by extending solutions from the pool (lines 5–9). A
new partial solution obtained from the lower level is added to the
temporary pool pool , if the length of the partial tour is lower than
upper bound UBF (lines 10–11).
In the second step of each iteration, all partial solutions
(pool ∪ pool ) are ranked by the length of the partial solution di-
vided by the number of orders already fulfilled. As orders can be
processed partially, the distance divided by the number of items
picked acts as a tie-breaker. The λ partial solutions with the low-
est ratios are kept in the pool and provide the basis for the next
iterations (lines 12–14). In the last iteration, partial solutions are
completed. Among all complete and feasible solutions the one with
the lowest objective value is returned (line 15).
Next, we detail how partial solutions are extended on the lower
level by Algorithm 3 . The algorithm receives the set O˜ of orders
that are not picked yet and the set P˜ of storage positions, whose
initial inventory is reduced according to the already picked items.
Additionally, set Ǒ contains orders, which are still active but not
yet completed. Their demands are partly satisfied.
15 determine lowest position v∗ of π̆ ∗ at which an order is
completely picked; // consider both possible directions
of the tour and select based on distances
r = randomly drawn double value between 0.0 and 1.0;
16
);
17 if (r < 0.5) then
18 stop subtour at storage position where order is completed
(v∗ unchanged);
19 else
20 proceed subtour until the picker comes along a depot
(update v∗ );
21 select depot to be visited after subtour
maxv ∈D {dist[v∗ ,v
d
]}−dist[v∗ ,vd ]+1
( P ( vd ) =  d
∗  ∗  );
v ∈D maxv ∈D {dist[v ,vd ]}−dist[v ,vd ]+1
d d
22 update π̆ ∗ , P˜, O˜ , and Ǒ;
23 return π̆ ∗ ;
At first, we determine how many orders (c + |Ǒ| ) are to be
picked in parallel during the extension of the partial solution. We
choose c with equal probabilities from integers 1 to min{|O˜ |, C −
|Ǒ|}. In doing so, the number of partly satisfied orders has to
be considered because they reduce the remaining cart capacity.
Based on this first decision, a set Oˆ of orders to be picked with
|Oˆ | = c and Oˆ ⊆ O˜ is generated by randomly selecting orders of O˜
with equal probabilities. Having these two sets, the (remaining) de-
mand of orders Ǒ ∪ Oˆ can be determined (lines 1–3). This demand
is addressed partly or fully during the next subtour. In this con-
text a subtour is defined as a sequence of stopovers starting and
ending at a depot and visiting pick positions in between solely.
Making use of the notation employed in Section 2, a partial so-
lution π̆ = ( (v0 , δ0 , o0 ), (v1 , δ1 , o1 ), . . . , (vm , δm , om ) ) is a subtour if
v0 , vm ∈ D and vi ∈ P ∀i = 1, . . . , (m − 1 ) holds.
To determine a set of subtours, then, storage positions to be
visited are selected. Afterwards, the shortest circular tour between
these storage positions is determined by using the efficient proce-
dure of Ratliff and Rosenthal (1983). Note that this procedure de-
rives the optimal circular tour and, thus, always returns the picker
to the initial depot. In our problem, however, this may not the best
choice, so that we do not necessarily take over the complete so-
lution but check whether a premature shortcut to a depot seems
advisable (see below). We apply three different penalty values
to select the storage positions, which base on the approximated
508 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
distances to be additionally covered if the respective position
is chosen:
v 1
SinglePosition : SPd (v ) = dvvd
MinMax : max (v ) = max{dvv }, starting with V˜ = {vd }
v ∈V˜
MinMin : min (v ) = min{dvv }, starting with V˜ = {vd }
v ∈V˜
For all three rules, SKUs are processed in non-descending or-
der by the quantity of storage positions available per SKU. Among
all storage positions not depleted yet and belonging to the cur-
rently considered SKU, the one with the lowest penalty value is
selected until the demand of the considered SKU is satisfied. To
avoid visiting more positions than required, the selected positions
are processed in non-ascending order of their penalty values, in a
second step, and deselected if the demand can still be satisfied af-
terwards. The three approaches differ only by the computation of
the penalty values. The SinglePosition rule uses the distance start-
ing from a given depot vd to the considered storage position v
to approximate the additional distance to be covered when visit-
ing v. The two other rules MinMax and MinMin employ the maxi-
mum/minimum distance to all storage positions selected until now.
The set of selected storage positions is initialized containing the
predefined depot vd in both rules.
All three rules depend on a given start depot. In a first step,
we create subtours based on the depot the picker is currently
located at by applying all three rules. All resulting subtours are
added to set l of potential subtours. However, it can be advan-
tageous to change the depot of the picker first before continuing
the picking process. To enable our procedure to do so, each of the
remaining depots is used as the start point of an additional sub-
tour. Each of these additional subtours is added to l with a prob-
ability of min{1, |D2 | } for each rule. Since we have three rules, the
mean value of subtours generated is 3 · (1 + (|D| − 1 ) · |D2 | ) ≈ 9 (for
large |D|). Among these subtours, we choose one with a probabil-
ity based on the tour length needed to satisfy the total demand.
The longer a subtour, the lower the chances to pick it (line 13).
Having selected a subtour, we check in both directions at which
point of the tour at least one order is completely picked and
choose the direction with a shorter distance to this point. In a sec-
ond step, we cut the subtour at that very position with a probabil-
ity of 50%. In the other half of the cases, we cut the tour when the
picker comes along a depot anyway. Now that we have the pick
positions of the subtour, we choose the depot to be visited after-
ward with probabilities based on the distance to be covered from
the last storage position visited to reach the respective depot in the
same way used to select the subtour (line 21). Finally the parame-
ters P˜, O˜ , and Ǒ are updated and the generated subtour is returned
(lines 22–23).
3.4. Improvement heuristic
Once a feasible solution is generated, whether by the nearest
neighbor heuristic or our pool-based approach, an iterative search
procedure can be employed to further improve the solution. The
procedure repeatedly unfixes parts of the tour and tries to connect
both loose ends of the tour by a shorter subtour still satisfying the
predefined demand. In doing so, the subtour is generated making
use of a greedy insertion algorithm based on a randomly generated
sequence of demanded SKUs. Additionally, the tour is tried to be
shortened by preponing order processing intervals. Note that pre-
vious and subsequent pick positions have to be considered when
generating a new subtour to obtain a feasible solution. In the fol-
lowing, we will detail the single steps of the iterative improvement
heuristic (Algorithm 4).
Algorithm 4: Heuristic improvement procedure.
for (i = 0; i < κ ; i++) do
(18)
2 reduce inventory γ according to tour π ;
3 π = π;
(19) 4 foreach subtour π̆ in π  in increasing order do
5 increase inventory γ according to subtour π̆ ;
(20) 6 initialize new subtour π̆  ;
7 foreach SKU s demanded in π̆ in randomized sequence
do
8 while demand of s not satisfied do
9 determine additional distance for each storage
position v ∈ Ps at each potential position within
π̆  ;
10 insert best storage position at best position into
π̆  and reduce inventory and demand;
11 while capacity C not fully utilized during subtour π̆  do
12 foreach order o in randomized sequence do
13 if any demand of o satisfiable without additional
effort then
14 plan new picking job substituting last
possible job of order o;
15 replace π̆ by π̆  in π  ;
16 if (π  .Length < π .Length) then
17 π = π ;
18 return improved solution;
First, the inventory of each storage position is reduced by the
total number of items picked from that very position during the
initial tour (line 2). In this way, improving a subtour does not
result in a shortage of items during a downstream picking stop.
The new solution π  is then generated on the basis of the cur-
rent solution π (line 3). During the improvement phase, sub-
tours are unfixed and improved in a subsequent manner. Note that
the definition of a subtour in Section 3.3 still holds in this con-
text. The improvement procedure considers subtours in increas-
ing order (line 4). The inventory of the warehouse is increased
according to the picking jobs during the unfixed subtour π̆ (line
5), and a greedy insertion logic is applied to replan the unfixed
subtour in a successive manner. Starting with a subtour π̆  con-
sisting only of the fixed start point vstart and end point vend
(π̆  = {(vstart , 0, −1 ), (vend , 0, −1 )}), all currently demanded SKUs
are processed in a randomly determined sequence during the re-
pair phase (lines 6–7). For each SKU, all combinations of storage
positions and sequence positions within the newly generated sub-
tour π̆  are compared, and the combination leading to the short-
est additional distance is added to the subtour as long as the de-
mand of the current SKU is not satisfied, before the next SKU is
processed (lines 8–10).
Afterwards, it is checked if full picker capacity is utilized during
the currently unfixed subtour (line 11). If not, the orders starting
right after the currently unfixed subtour are evaluated in a ran-
domized sequence, and new picking jobs are added to subtour π̆ 
if the corresponding position could be visited without additional
effort (lines 12–14). Newly planned picking jobs of preponed or-
ders substitute the latest picking job of the same SKU of that very
order. In this way, there is a high probability that the order can
both be started and completed earlier. After the preponement step,
subtour π̆ is substituted by π̆  in the new tour π  (line 15). Note
that even if the newly generated subtour is longer than π̆ , a better
solution can be obtained (e.g., if an order was preponed). For this
reason, π̆  is accepted for sure, whereas an evaluation is executed
once all subtours are processed. The new tour π  , obtained by the
single improvement runs, is accepted as the current solution, if it
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
Table 2
Parameter values for instance generation.
Symbol Description
w Number of aisles
h Length of aisles [in #storage positions]
|S| Number of SKUs
|D | Number of depots
|O| Number of orders
omax Number of items per order
γ max Max. number of items stored per storage position
C Capacity of picking cart
is the new best known solution (lines 16–17). This procedure is re-
peated for κ iterations, such that κ is a parameter determining the
search effort of the greedy improvement heuristic (line 1). Finally,
the best solution found is returned (line 18).
4. Performance of solution procedures
In this section, the performance of our solution procedures is
tested. As no established testbed is available for our routing prob-
lem, instance generation is detailed in Section 4.1. Afterward, pa-
rameter tuning (Section 4.2) and performance results of our solu-
tion procedures are presented (Section 4.3).
All computations are executed on a 64-bit PC with an Intel Core
i7-6700K CPU (4 x 4.0 gigahertz), 64 gigabytes main memory, and
Windows 7 Enterprise. The procedures are implemented using C#
(Visual Studio 2017), and the off-the-shelf solver Gurobi (version
7.5.1) is applied for solving the MIP models.
4.1. Instance generation
We generate two different sizes of test instances. The ones in
the small dataset are still solvable to optimality by a standard
solver, while the ones labeled large represent instances of real-
world size. The parameters handed over to our data generator are
presented in Table 2. The procedure of instance generation is sum-
marized in the following.
Warehouse layout: The warehouse is equipped with parallel
racks arranged along w aisles, which lead into the cross aisles at
the front and rear of the warehouse. Storage positions within a
rack are quadratic and the depth of a rack is assumed to equal the
width of an aisle (Fig. 4). Therefore, we can measure distances via
the resulting grid of squares. Two depots are located at both cross
aisles at the end of each (normal) aisle. Whenever |D| < 2 · w, not
any aisle can house depots at both ends. They are skipped such
that depots are located in an equidistant manner along the cross
aisles.
Storage assignment: As storage turnover often follows the Pareto
principle (e.g., de Koster et al., 2007), we subdivide SKUs into 20%
A-, 30% B-, and 50% C-products. First, between 1 and γ max items of
each SKU are assigned randomly to one storage position per SKU
to assure that each product can be found in the warehouse at least
once. The remaining storage positions are assigned with a chance
of 80% to an A-product, with a chance of 15% to a B-product, and
with a chance of 5% to a C-product. Once the class is selected, the
SKU to be assigned is drawn from the set of SKUs belonging to that
class with equal probabilities. Finally, between 1 and γ max items of
the chosen SKU are assigned to the respective storage position.
Generation of pick lists: Pick lists are generated by randomly se-
lecting |O| · omax items stored in the warehouse. In this way, we
can ensure feasible problem instances because the quantity of de-
manded items cannot exceed the number of those available. Note
that the cart capacity C of order bins within the mixed-shelves
warehouses we visited varied between 2 and 4 bins, so that these
values are realistic. Further note that the average number of items
509
Small Large
2 40
5 150
{3, 6, 9} {20 0 0, 350 0, 50 0 0}
{2, 4} {26, 80}
3 10
{1, 2} {1, 2}
{1, 2} {1, 4}
2 4
per order ranges between 1 and 2 items (Section 1), so that pa-
rameter omax is realistic for all mixed-shelves warehouses where
no batching is applied.
We repeat this procedure 20 times for each parameter set-
ting, so that we receive 480 small instances and another 480 large
instances.
4.2. Parameter tuning for the heuristic procedures
This section explores the impact of the steering parameters of
both, the pool-based procedure (Section 3.3) as well as the im-
provement heuristic (Section 3.4). Recall that parameters λ and
μ of the pool-based procedure define the number of partial so-
lutions held in the pool and the relative number of new solutions
generated, respectively. Specifically, we combine parameter values
λ ∈ {10, 15, 20, 30} and μ ∈ {1, 3, 5, 10} in a full-factorial manner
and solve all small and large data instances to evaluate the impact
of these parameters. The results are summarized in Fig. 2, where
we relate objective value (‘F ’) and solution time (‘sec’) to the vary-
ing values of the steering parameters.
The results reveal that an increasing λ value leads to a more
extensive search and, therefore, lower objective values and a
higher computation time. This holds true for both datasets. The
analogous effect is recorded for μ in most cases. However, an
interesting effect can be observed for the small dataset. Choosing
a μ value of 10, up to 300 new partial solutions are generated in
each iteration. As the size of the instances is restricted, however,
many of these partial solutions are similar. In consequence, the
pool becomes degenerated and further search is mainly based on
the same partial solutions. This leads to a nearly constant solution
quality irrespective of the λ value. The same effect, although at a
much larger μ value, is assumed for the large dataset.
The search effort of the improvement heuristic introduced in
Section 3.4 is specified by steering parameter κ . To get insight into
the impact of this parameter, we vary parameter values κ ∈ {0, 1,
2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 150}, where the start solution
is determined making use of the nearest neighbor procedure (NN)
and the pool-based procedure (using steering parameters μ = 5,
λ = 20 and μ = 10, λ = 30), respectively. Results are presented in
Fig. 3.
The local search procedure is able to improve average solution
values of both procedures and all parameter combinations inves-
tigated. Naturally, a higher number of iterations leads to a bet-
ter solution quality. The potential of the improvement procedure,
however, is depending on the solution quality of the start solu-
tion. The solutions of the pool-based procedure can only be im-
proved marginally for the small dataset, while the nearest neigh-
bor heuristic provides plenty potential for further improvement.
The time consumption of the improvement procedure is hardly
measurable. Only for the large dataset a slight linear increase ex-
ists. Even when executing κ = 150 iterations, the total computa-
tion time rises only by about 0.15 seconds, irrespective of the start
solution.
510 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
Fig. 2. Influence of parameters μ and λ on solution quality (a, b) and time consumption (c, d) for small (a, c) and large (b, d) instances.
4.3. Computational performance
This section is dedicated to the performance of our solution
methods. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard
solver Gurobi solving MSPR-MIP, nearest neighbor heuristic (NN),
pool-based procedure (pool), and both of the latter two heuris-
tics executed with the additional improvement procedure via local
search (NN+ , pool+ ). Note that Gurobi solving MSPR-MIP is given
a maximum solution time of 30 minutes. First, we report the so-
lution performance for the small dataset. The results are summa-
rized in Table 3. We report the number of optimal solution found
(‘#opt’), the average relative gap to the optimal solutions (‘gap’),
and the solution time (‘sec’) in CPU-seconds for each procedure.
Our small instances have only 20 storage positions and between
3 and 6 items to be picked in total. Nonetheless, standard solver
Gurobi is not able to find all optimal solutions, i.e., 477 of 480
instances are solved to proven optimality. The main impact factor
on Gurobi’s performance is the length of the pick list. If each or-
der demands just omax = 1 item, Gurobi finds optimal solutions for
all instances in about 1.92 seconds on average. However, if the or-
der size increases and omax = 2 items are demanded, the average
computation time increases to 193.62 seconds and 98.8% of the in-
stances are solved to proven optimality in the given time frame.
Our improved pool-based heuristic pool+ (executed with parame-
ter values λ = 30, μ = 3, and κ = 150) finds the proven optimum
in 96.6% of all instances for which the optimal objective value is
available. The average gap to the optimal solutions is merely about
0.55%, and in spite of this very convincing performance, the aver-
age solution time ranges around one-hundredth of a second only.
Compared to the pool-based procedure without improvement, the
time consumption does not vary in a measurable way, the solution
quality, however, increases slightly due to the improvement heuris-
tic applying local search. The nearest neighbor approach is even
faster; its solution time is barely measurable. The solution quality,
though, is not that good. The average gap to the optimum amounts
to 26.14%. Even when the solution is further improved making use
of the local search procedure, the average optimality gap still adds
up to 22.0%.
The results for the large dataset are reported in Table 4. Un-
fortunately, standard solver Gurobi is not able to find feasible
solutions for any of the instances. In spite of 64 gigabytes of
main memory, it always returned a buffer overflow. Therefore, we
can only compare the results of our four heuristics. Again, the
pool-based(+ ) approach clearly outperforms the NN(+ ) heuristic.
The pool+ procedure is able to find the best known solution for
391 instances (81.5%). However, in 89 cases, NN+ finds a solution
of higher quality than pool+ . The solutions of NN+ , though, are
only slightly better, resulting in a mean gap to the best solution of
about 1% for the pool+ approach. The gap of NN+ amounts to more
than 11%. Solving the large dataset, the additional improvement
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515 511

Fig. 3. Influence of parameter κ on solution quality (a, b) and time consumption (c, d) for small (a, c) and large (b, d) instances.

Table 3
Solution performance for the small dataset.

omax |S| γ max |D | Gurobi pool+ pool NN+ NN

(λ = 30, μ = 3, κ = 5) (λ = 30, μ = 3) (κ = 15)
#opt/sec #opt/gap/sec #opt/gap/sec #opt/gap/sec #opt/gap/sec

1 3 1 1 20/1.32 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 14/9.05%/ < 0.001 14/9.05%/ < 0.001

2 20/0.99 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 14/8.75%/ < 0.001 13/9.75%/ < 0.001
2 1 20/1.84 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 16/7.62%/ < 0.001 15/8.53%/ < 0.001
2 20/1.15 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 14/8.75%/ < 0.001 13/9.46%/ < 0.001
6 1 1 20/2.66 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 8/18.93%/ < 0.001 6/23.74%/ < 0.001
2 20/1.57 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 13/8.51%/ < 0.001 11/11.49%/ < 0.001
2 1 20/2.89 19/1.25%/0.01 19/1.25%/0.01 12/11.22%/ < 0.001 10/13.04%/ < 0.001
2 20/1.49 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 14/14.40%/ < 0.001 13/16.55%/ < 0.001
9 1 1 20/2.85 19/0.91%/0.01 19/0.91%/0.01 7/19.15%/ < 0.001 2/35.73%/ < 0.001
2 20/1.55 18/1.96%/0.01 18/1.96%/0.01 8/20.63%/ < 0.001 6/23.31%/ < 0.001
2 1 20/3.15 19/1.25%/0.01 19/1.25%/0.01 9/14.56%/ < 0.001 9/16.14%/ < 0.001
2 20/1.54 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 10/19.10%/ < 0.001 8/24.93%/ < 0.001
2 3 1 1 20/62.89 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 0/34.46%/ < 0.001 0/38.10%/ < 0.001
2 20/45.21 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 3/33.86%/ < 0.001 2/36.63%/ < 0.001
2 1 20/56.61 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 5/23.69%/ < 0.001 5/23.69%/ < 0.001
2 20/46.34 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 3/27.74%/ < 0.001 2/29.17%/ < 0.001
6 1 1 20/349.39 17/2.83%/0.01 17/2.83%/0.01 1/34.23%/ < 0.001 1/39.27%/ < 0.001
2 20/170.34 18/1.34%/0.01 18/1.34%/0.01 2/31.84%/ < 0.001 2/34.70%/ < 0.001
2 1 20/267.18 19/0.91%/0.01 18/1.68%/0.01 3/31.13%/ < 0.001 3/39.52%/ < 0.001
2 20/195.19 20/0.00%/0.01 20/0.00%/0.01 6/23.20%/ < 0.001 4/27.64%/ < 0.001
9 1 1 19/274.14 16/1.68%/0.01 16/1.68%/0.01 4/34.88%/ < 0.001 4/42.76%/ < 0.001
2 20/193.66 19/0.56%/0.01 18/1.18%/0.01 4/28.87%/ < 0.001 3/35.21%/ < 0.001
2 1 18/352.64 18/0.00%/0.01 17/1.11%/0.01 1/32.50%/ < 0.001 1/42.60%/ < 0.001
2 20/309.85 19/0.50%/0.01 19/0.50%/0.01 4/32.68%/ < 0.001 2/38.75%/ < 0.001
aggregated: 477/97.77 461/0.55%/0.01 458/0.65%/0.01 175/22.00%/ < 0.001 149/26.14%/ < 0.001
512 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515

Fig. 4. Warehouse setup for (a) dedicated, (b) mixed-shelves, and (c) split storage.

Table 4
Solution performance for the large dataset.

omax |S| γ max |D | pool+ pool NN+ NN

(λ = 30, μ = 10, κ = 150) (λ = 30, μ = 10) (κ = 150)
#best/gap to best/sec #best/gap to best/sec #best/gap to best/sec #best/gap to best/sec

1 20 0 0 1 1 18/0.77%/19.60 3/4.15%/19.53 8/9.42%/0.08 2/18.98%/ < 0.001

3 19/0.53%/14.78 4/5.52%/14.71 1/21.68%/0.08 0/34.61%/ < 0.001
4 1 13/2.28%/19.39 2/6.67%/19.32 9/9.37%/0.08 0/22.27%/ < 0.001
3 19/0.17%/14.57 1/5.02%/14.50 2/19.57%/0.07 0/30.03%/ < 0.001
3500 1 1 18/0.38%/21.68 5/3.22%/21.54 7/8.27%/0.11 1/14.59%/ < 0.001
3 18/0.10%/16.62 5/3.18%/16.49 2/21.77%/0.11 0/30.62%/ < 0.001
4 1 20/0.00%/21.91 1/4.32%/21.77 3/13.53%/0.11 0/24.11%/ < 0.001
3 19/0.07%/16.12 7/3.60%/15.99 2/22.60%/0.11 0/30.56%/ < 0.001
50 0 0 1 1 18/0.46%/23.18 5/3.26%/22.98 6/10.03%/0.15 0/21.37%/ < 0.001
3 20/0.00%/17.69 5/2.88%/17.51 0/20.12%/0.15 0/25.37%/ < 0.001
4 1 18/0.25%/24.31 5/2.22%/24.12 3/14.45%/0.15 1/18.77%/ < 0.001
3 20/0.00%/17.56 5/3.05%/17.38 0/26.74%/0.15 0/33.87%/ < 0.001
2 20 0 0 1 1 11/4.61%/20.74 2/10.00%/20.64 13/3.14%/0.07 0/22.86%/ < 0.001
3 17/1.03%/16.09 0/8.71%/16.01 3/10.34%/0.07 0/32.24%/ < 0.001
4 1 15/1.91%/20.60 0/9.94%/20.50 7/7.33%/0.08 0/35.83%/ < 0.001
3 14/1.58%/16.07 0/11.32%/15.99 6/9.95%/0.08 0/38.14%/ < 0.001
3500 1 1 11/2.86%/23.70 1/7.18%/23.51 10/4.35%/0.12 0/20.64%/ < 0.001
3 15/1.31%/17.58 1/7.58%/17.41 6/5.81%/0.12 0/24.99%/ < 0.001
4 1 11/1.86%/23.59 0/5.71%/23.39 10/5.90%/0.12 0/24.71%/ < 0.001
3 17/0.53%/17.54 1/5.80%/17.37 3/11.91%/0.12 0/34.64%/ < 0.001
50 0 0 1 1 14/2.23%/25.35 0/5.24%/25.06 8/5.41%/0.15 0/20.79%/ < 0.001
3 16/1.94%/19.28 2/5.19%/19.07 4/5.84%/0.15 0/24.32%/ < 0.001
4 1 13/1.99%/26.17 1/6.30%/25.91 11/4.23%/0.15 0/16.36%/ < 0.001
3 17/0.53%/18.63 3/4.05%/18.40 4/10.36%/0.15 0/26.58%/ < 0.001
aggregated: 391/1.14%/19.70 59/5.59%/19.54 128/11.76%/0.11 4/26.14%/ < 0.001
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
step shows a higher effect, so that both (unimproved) construction
heuristics show significant gaps compared to their improved
version. While the computational time of NN(+ ) is still well below
one fifth of a second, the CPU time of our pool-based(+ ) approach
amounts to approximately 20 seconds. This still seems acceptable
in practical scenarios, so that we conclude that our pool-based
heuristic with improvement (pool+ ) is well suited for solving
MSPR of real-world size.
5. Managerial aspects
Compared to traditional storage policies, where unit loads are
kept together and are jointly stored in specific shelves, mixed-
shelves warehouses have two main drawbacks, which give rise to
the three research questions to be answered in this section:
• To spread items of the same SKU all over the shelves, the unit
loads that the SKUs arrive on need to be broken down and lo-
gistics workers have to bring the individual items to diverse
storage positions. Thus, to harvest the advantages of mixed
shelves during order picking, additional effort when replen-
ishing the racks arises (Weidinger & Boysen, 2018). Therefore,
we are interested in a performance comparison of two differ-
ent warehouse settings: (a) a mixed-shelves warehouse, and
(a) Dedicated storage: All items of the same SKU are stored at clus-
(b) a traditional warehouse applying dedicated storage, where
all items of a SKU are assigned to a joint and unique stor-
age position. We generate picking orders and pick the same
(b) Mixed-shelves storage: The items of the SKUs are randomly
set of orders from both settings. By comparing both results,
we can quantify the gains of scattered storage in terms of re-
(c) Split storage: The warehouse is subdivided into two parts. On
duced picker travel. Practitioners can then weigh up these gains
against the additional effort to be spent during the put-away
process of mixed-shelves storage.
• Mixed-shelves storage is especially suited for small-sized or-
ders demanding just a few items per order line. As soon as an
occasional larger order with multiple items occurs, the stock
in a single shelf may not be sufficient, and the picker has
to visit multiple storage positions in order to gather enough
items. Thus, large-sized orders increase the picking effort un-
der mixed-shelves storage. Therefore, it is interesting to know
at what apportionment of large- and small-sized orders the
turning point between dedicated and mixed-shelves storage is
reached.
• Today, many retailers aim at an omni-channel sales strategy,
so that often (large-sized) orders of physical brick-and-mortar
stores and (small-sized) customer orders placed via a webshop
need to be fulfilled from the same warehouse (Agatz, Fleis-
chmann, & Van Nunen, 2008). In this case, depending on the
apportionment of large- and small-sized orders, either dedi-
cated or mixed-shelves storage will show advantageous. How-
ever, there is also a third alternative, which is to subdivide
the warehouse into a dedicated storage area, where items of
the same SKU are kept together and batch orders of brick-and-
mortar stores are processed, and a mixed-shelves section ded-
icated to small-sized online orders. Therefore, another aim of
this section is to benchmark a split-warehouse strategy against
the other two alternatives.
To answer these research questions, our computational exper-
iment is designed as follows. We generate large instances with
20 0 0 SKUs. We assume that, in total, 120 items, i.e., 1% of the total
stock, have to be picked in each instance. The items are demanded
by two different kinds of orders. There are small-sized online or-
ders each demanding two items of randomly determined SKUs
and large-sized batch orders requiring 10 items of two SKUs each.
These SKUs are randomly chosen among all those SKUs having a
minimum stock level of 20 items, so that we are sure to generate
513
feasible instances. Within our test instances, we vary the appor-
tionment between online and batch orders. When picking a total of
120 items, up to 6 batch orders are possible. We vary the fraction
of items belonging to online orders as follows: 0%, 17%, 33%, 50%,
67%, 83%, and 100%. Depot settings as shown in Table 2 are used
and we generate 240 instances per parameter setting, so that in to-
tal 3360 instances, i.e., 480 instances per data point (item fraction
of online orders), are generated. All resulting instances are solved
with our improved pool-based heuristic (executed with parameter
values λ = 30, μ = 10, and κ = 150).
Irrespective of the storage assignment strategy, the setting of
the warehouse is identical to the one described in Section 4.1. De-
pots are spread all over the warehouse, and two depots can always
be found on both ends of the same aisle. However, we additionally
have to process batch orders now. As those orders are often packed
on separate stations in business practice, we introduce a special
batch order depot on the upper left corner of the warehouse, where
each batch order picker tour starts and ends. Due to the higher vol-
ume of these orders, picker capacity amounts to C = 1 for this kind
of order. Picker capacity for online orders still amounts to C = 4.
Having this basic setting, the orders are to be satisfied by three al-
ternative warehouse settings, which are schematically depicted (in
reduced size) by Fig. 4 and explained in the following:
tered positions within the warehouse. A-class SKUs are stored
in the aisles closest to the depot; C-class SKUs farthest away.
spread all over the warehouse.
the left side, there is the batch area with the depot in the
upper left corner and dedicated storage applied. In the remain-
ing part of the warehouse, mixed-shelves storage is applied.
The size of the scattered section as well as the relative quan-
tity of items per SKU stored there corresponds to the relative
amount of items picked for online orders. Note that anticipating
the fraction of online orders is an aggregated forecast, which is
assumed to be possible with the required precision.
The results of these tests are depicted in Fig. 5. Specifically, we
report the total picking distance (left) and the relative increase of
picking distance over split storage (right) for all three warehouse
settings and relate these results to the fraction of items demanded
by online orders. The following answers to our research questions
can be derived from these graphs:
• If we have only online orders, i.e., the percentage of items de-
manded by online orders is 100%, mixed-shelves storage leads
to much better picking performance than dedicated storage;
the total travel distance of the picker more than halves. This
considerable advantage seems to outweigh the additional ef-
fort of the put-away process in order to realize mixed-shelves
storage. This assessment is supported by the fact that only or-
der picking is the time-critical process determining the cus-
tomers’ waiting times, whereas replenishment has no direct
impact on customer satisfaction and is, thus, not (that) time-
critical (Section 1.1).
• The turning point between mixed-shelves storage and ded-
icated storage is already reached once 33% of all items are
demanded by online orders. At a larger (smaller) fraction
mixed-shelves (dedicated) storage becomes preferable. Evi-
dently, dedicated storage considerably suffers when having to
process small-sized online orders, so that the turning point
is reached astonishingly early. Dedicated storage requires long
walks between the storage positions of online orders, whereas
mixed-shelves enlarge the probability of close-by storage loca-
tions of requested items. On the other hand, our results clearly
514 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
Fig. 5. Performance benchmark for the three warehouse settings depending on the fraction of items demanded by online orders.
indicate that applying mixed-shelves storage when less than
33% of items stem from online orders is not recommendable. If
no online orders occur, dedicated storage reduces picker travel
by a remarkable 189%.
• Finally, we benchmark mixed-shelves storage and dedi-
cated storage with the compromise strategy denoted as
split-warehouse storage. The maximum advantage of split-
warehouse storage, i.e., 39.7%, is reached at the turning point
where 33% of all items are ordered via the online channel. We
have to keep in mind, however, that the price for this advantage
is organizational overhead for managing and operating two sep-
arate warehouse areas. Therefore, switching to split-warehouse
storage will not pay if the gains in terms of reduced picker
travel are too small, so that the corridor where split-warehouse
storage should be considered as a serious alternative is com-
paratively small. For instance, the corridor where picker travel
is reduced by about 25% just ranges somewhere between 25%
and 50% of all items ordered online.
Note that another managerial aspect is considered in the ap-
pendix, where we explore the impact of an increasing capacity of
the picking cart on the picker travel. The results presented there
show that the positive effect of additional cart capacity quickly di-
minishes. Small and agile carts with a capacity for up to a handful
of orders lead to considerable reductions of picker travel. Larger
and bulky carts that would considerably increase the ergonomic
burden for the pickers only lead to small marginal reductions and,
thus, need not be considered.
6. Conclusion
This paper defines the picker-routing problem for the mixed-
shelves warehouses applied by many online retailers. In such ware-
houses, unit loads are purposefully broken down, and single items
of the same SKU are spread all over the shelves. During picker
routing, this gives the additional flexibility of having alternative
shelves that a specific SKU can be retrieved from. Furthermore, our
picker-routing problem considers (a) a cart pushed by the picker
that allows to assemble multiple orders concurrently, and (b) mul-
tiple access points to the central conveyor system where com-
pleted orders are handed over. The resulting optimization prob-
lem is defined, computational complexity is proven, and a suited
heuristic solution procedure is developed. This procedure is able to
handle the thousands of SKUs relevant in real-world warehouses.
Furthermore, we address managerial aspects in our computational
studies. Specifically, we compare mixed-shelves storage with ded-
icated storage and a split warehouse where both policies are ap-
plied in parallel in separate areas. We benchmark these warehouse
settings by varying the apportionment between small-sized on-
line orders and large-sized orders, e.g., posed by brick-and-mortar
stores, additionally serviced under an omni-channel sales strategy.
Our results show which storage policy is superior under which cir-
cumstances.
This paper considers only the single-picker case. Future re-
search should extend our picker-routing problem to a multiple-
picker environment. In real-world warehouses, multiple pickers are
employed in parallel, who influence each other with regard to the
shelves they access and the inventory they retrieve from there. We
assume that the coordination of pickers has already been accom-
plished on a superordinate planning level. How exactly our single-
picker case can be applied in a larger solution framework that also
includes picker coordination remains up to future research.
Appendix A. Impact of cart capacity on picker travel
This appendix explores the impact of the capacity of the pick-
ing cart on the picking performance. Specifically, we vary param-
eter C ∈ {1, 2, 4, 6, 8}, which defines the number of orders that
can concurrently be assembled by the picker. We solve each of the
large instances (Section 4.1) with any of the aforementioned capac-
ities by applying our improved pool-based heuristic (with parame-
ter values λ = 30, μ = 10, and κ = 150). The resulting average total
picking distance for any of these capacities is plotted in Fig. 6.
1,000
800
600
400
200
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Fig. 6. Impact of cart capacity C on picking performance.
 F. Weidinger et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2019) 501–515
The results show that the positive effect of additional
cart capacity quickly diminishes. Increasing the capacity from a
single order to two and four concurrent orders leads to consider-
able reductions of the picker travel. From then on, only moderate
additional gains can be realized. This is good news for the practi-
tioner. Already relatively small and agile picking carts with a ca-
pacity for just a few orders lead to a good performance, so that
larger carts that would considerably increase the ergonomic bur-
den for the pickers need not be considered.
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