Chamra Smith Email & Phone Number

This project explores what factors contribute to increased order picking time in a specific warehouse layout. Warehouses are extremely complex and as a result an difficult portion of the supply chain to model. Of all the processes that occur inside a warehouse order picking is probably the most important as it accounts for 55% of all total costs. In order to determine the biggest contributors to inefficiencies in the picking process we created a simulation that can model the picking process in a warehouse. The simulation was an agent based model written in the Java programming language and built with the platform. Agents represented the various actors present in a warehouse, such as the pickers, conveyor segment, and the warehouse itself. warehouse layout program was also created in order to feed the simulation information related to the warehouses’ layout, and a database was used to store item stock, incoming orders, and final results of the simulation. The simulation was subsequently used to determine some interesting relationships between the warehouse layout and the picking times for a pre-determined set of customer orders. The parameters changed included the number of orders allowed to be processed at one time, whether or not the picker was collecting multiple items on a picking route, how the items were distributed (sorted) on the shelves, and after our results were analyzed it was found that there were many parameters that had an influence on the picking time.