The steady growth of e-commerce is placing increasing demands on intralogistics. Order picking, in particular, incurs high costs and is highly labor-intensive. At the same time, the shortage of skilled workers is exacerbating the situation, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. Automation, particularly through mobile robots, therefore offers significant potential for improving efficiency.
There are currently a wide variety of alternative solutions on the market, both for robotic systems and for more established automated systems such as automated small-parts warehouses. However, existing planning guidelines and manuals for order picking systems do not address how to select the system that best meets a company's specific requirements from among all the systems available on the market.
The goal of the research project PEAK is to enable a neutral evaluation of all common picking methods, so that interested companies can receive an unbiased recommendation for the system that best suits their needs. To this end, a simulation-based planning tool is being developed that determines the optimal configuration of the picking system based on the existing product and order structure, the facility layout, and the available workforce.
The research project is divided into several work packages. The first work package involves identifying the relevant order-picking methods. Building on this, the second work package identifies degrees of freedom for the configuration and operation of the order-picking systems. The third work package involves modeling and implementing the selected order-picking systems in a test environment using discrete-event simulation. Subsequently, in the fourth work package, the developed models will be validated and parameter studies conducted. In the fifth work package, relevant parameter ranges for decision-making will be identified based on the simulation results. Finally, in the sixth work package, a demonstrator to support decision-making will be developed.
The IGF project 01IF23717N of the German Logistics Association (BVL) is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy through the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as part of the program to promote industrial collaborative research (IGF), pursuant to a resolution of the German Bundestag.