A New Genetic Algorithm for Order-Picking of Irregular Warehouse

This paper proposed a data structure to store irregular warehouse layout diagram. A warehouse unit is defined as four kinds, which are storage point, passage, node and block respectively. The shortest distance and route between two storage points can be calculated by virtue of their adjacent nodes. Based on this, a new genetic algorithm is proposed with an assumption that an order-picking operation always access goods as many as the vehicle can accommodate. An order involved some goods stored in different storage points. The storage pointpsilas sequence in the order is encoded a chromosome. A chromosome determines the number of order-picking operations and the total distance. Although this assumption made the algorithm search only part of the whole solution space, compared with one of the other genetic algorithm, this new genetic algorithm has better result. The reason maybe lies in that fewer order-picking operations conform to the optimizing goal.