摘要：Background: Order-picking is a fundamental warehousing activity that accounts for in excess of 60% oftotal warehousing costs. Movements of pickers consume as much as half of the picking time. Thus determining pickingpaths is crucial. The most frequently used method is the S-shape one.Material and methods: The average picking path length for 240 variants of the storage area (depot location, storagestrategy), inventory (ABC-storage class sizes, probability of retrieving) and customer order (number of lines – 5, 10, 15)parameters was calculated. 100 simulations were carried out each time. MS Excel spreadsheet, along with macros (VBA)were used.Results: The comparison were made of path lengths for a single block warehouse with 320 storage locations, WithinAisle/Randomstorage strategies and low-level picking. Depot locations in the corner of a warehouse and in the middle ofa front aisle were considered. The path lengths significantly varied with the variants that were analyzed. The shortestpaths were observed for the Within-Aisle strategy, corner located depot, order sizes 5 or 10 and sizes of ABC-storageclasses equal to 5/35/60% or 10/35/55% of all 320 storage locations under a retrieving probability of 90/5/5%.Conclusions: Better and worse picking variants exist, influencing significantly the length of picking paths determinedusing the S-shape method. In general, the depot location is less important, even though the best variant assumed a cornerlocation, while a location in the middle of a front aisle gives shorter paths on average. A much more important factor isthe storage strategy. Lack of the strategy (randomness) substantially extends path lengths (by 50% on average).
关键词：warehousing; order picking; S;shape method; picking paths length.
