Analyzing the Effect of Multiple Depots Under Order Splitting Strategy While Solving Order Batching and Assignment Problem

In recent years, practitioners and researchers have paid great attention to increase the efficiency of supply chain management due to global economic changes. One of the most important issue of any supply chain is warehouses and therefore, managing warehouse operations in an effective way has become very significant for both manufacturers and e-commerce companies. Previous studies about warehouse operations showed that one of the most costly and labor incentive process in warehouse is order picking operations. Because of this, increasing order picking efficiency has huge impact on total warehouse management efficiency. Researchers have focused on different aspect (problem scope) like order batching, routing, storage assignment etc. of warehouse management operations and developed divergent solution approaches like exact solution methods, simulations and/or heuristic/metaheuristic algorithms to handle these problems. In this study, it is aimed to analyze the effect of constructing multiple depots while solving order batching and assignment problem under order splitting strategy. For this purpose, mathematical model is developed and two different randomly generated order groups which contain 20 and 25 customer orders are used to conduct analyses. For each group, 20 separate experiments are performed from two divergent perspectives, single and multiple depots. Results of the experiments showed that constructing multiple depots can decrease total order picking distances. There is also the potential for the positive impact of constructing multiple depots to increase when the number of customer orders handled increases.