Felix Weidinger

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• Professor at Technical University of Darmstadt

E-commerce retailers face the challenge to assemble large numbers of time-critical picking orders each consisting of just a few order lines with low order quantities. Traditional picker-to-parts warehouses are often ill-suited for these prerequisites, so that automated warehousing systems (e.g., automated picking workstations, robots, and AGV-assis...

Scattered storage is a storage assignment strategy where single items are isolated and distributed all around the shelves of a warehouse. This way, the probability of always having some items per stock-keeping units close-by is increased, which is intended to reduce the unproductive walking time during order picking. Scattered storage is especially...

There is a vivid debate in cities all over the world on how to distribute the restricted space in urban areas among stakeholders. Urban design movements such as new pedestrianism or Copenhagenization advocate that too much space is attributed to cars. In this context, our research investigates the optimization of parking lots with the help of mathe...

To optimize their order fulfillment processes, many e-commerce warehouses employ a storage assignment strategy known as scattered or mixed-shelves storage. Under this approach, unit loads of homogeneous products are divided, and individual pieces are stored in various shelves throughout the warehouse. This arrangement ensures that products that app...

This paper develops a novel strategic decision support framework for the design of an order picking system, which can be used whenever different systems and/or control mechanisms need to be compared for a given customer order structure. Warehousing companies frequently struggle in selecting the most suitable design for their order picking system. T...

The use of mobile robots, particularly the Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System (RMFS), has increased in retail logistics. Especially in e-commerce, which is characterized by high demand fluctuations and diverse product ranges, RMFS offers advantages. The existing literature suggests that the overall optimization of a RMFS is often challenging due to...

Manual materials handling (MMH) is an important logistics activity. It often requires human workers to repetitively stretch or bend while handling materials, exposing workers to the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). A structured approach of motion data collection serves as a first essential step to evaluate physical ergonomics of...

This paper addresses the operational planning problem of assigning orders and pods (i.e., mobile shelves) to picking stations in a multi-level robotic mobile fulfillment system (RMFS), which deals with two issues: deciding on which picking station handles which order, and from which pods to pick the ordered items, considering the limited storage ca...

E-commerce led to drastic changes in end consumer behavior over the last years. In consequence, today’s retailers often need to provide online channels to stay attractive and competitive. The logistic processes behind this online front-end, needed to smoothly ship small orders, picked from a large assortment in little time, however, are complex and...

To improve picking performance, many warehouses apply order batching and/or zoning in their picking areas. The former policy collects multiple customer orders jointly on a picker tour to increase picking density, and the latter partitions the picking area into smaller zones to enable a parallel order processing. Both picking policies require an add...

To transfer export cars on board of car carrier vessels in vehicle transshipment terminals or to rebalance the vehicles of car sharing providers in urban areas, plenty of car relocation moves need to be processed. Often in these settings, a team of drivers cooperates to execute a given set of car movements. They are chauffeured by a taxi towards th...

Truck scheduling coordinates the loading and unloading processes of trucks competing for the timely processing at some terminal, e.g., a cross-docking terminal or distribution center. Existing research almost invariably assumes that the (un-)loading times of trucks are fixed. In the real-world, however, terminal managers have the additional flexibi...

This paper treats an automated warehousing system, known as the KIVA system, where mobile robots lift complete racks and autonomously move them to stationary pickers. This innovative parts-to-picker system relieves the pickers from unproductive walking times without requiring high investment costs into inflexible hardware such as conveyors, storage...

Plenty retailers handling fresh produce face the following operational problem in their distribution centers: Pallets of food assembled during the day according to the demands of supermarkets are to be intermediately stored overnight. To save cooling costs, deep-lane storage in some compact storage system is applied, from which the pallets are to b...

Hub terminals are important entities in today's distribution networks. They exist for all means of transportation, e.g., cross docks for trucks, hub airports for aircraft, transshipment yards for freight trains, and container ports for vessels. This paper abstracts from the peculiarities of each application and presents a generic problem setting, w...

E-commerce retailers face the challenge to assemble large numbers of time-critical picking orders, of which each typically consists of just a few order lines and low order quantities. To efficiently solve this task, many warehouses in this segment are organized according to the mixed-shelves paradigm. Incoming unit loads are isolated into single un...

Induced by the rise of online retailing new storage strategies have evolved, designed to meet the demands of e-commerce warehousing. Although many of these new approaches have established over the last few years, literature on basic planning problems in these environments can be found only rarely. This paper points out the special needs of e-commer...

To reduce the negative impact of excessive traffic in large urban areas, many innovative concepts for intelligent transportation of people and freight have recently been developed. One of these concepts relies on autonomous delivery robots launched from trucks. A truck loads the freight dedicated to a set of customers in a central depot and moves i...

Scattered storage (also denoted as mixed shelves storage) is a warehousing strategy often found in business-to-consumer online retailing. Unit loads are broken down into single items that are spread throughout the warehouse, leading to multiple storage positions per stock keeping unit. This paper investigates the picker routing problem in a rectang...

In warehouses, order consolidation processes are inevitable whenever picking orders are assembled under a zoning and/or batching policy. In our specific warehouse setting, bins containing partial orders picked under a zoning and batching policy are intermediately stored in an automated storage/retrieval system (ASRS) and, afterwards, released on a...

Batching and zoning are popular picking strategies to speed up picker-to-parts order fulfillment systems. On the negative side, these strategies require a subsequent order consolidation to separate the customer orders. In a widespread setup implemented by many online retailers put walls are applied to consolidate orders manually. A batch of orders...

The distribution networks of the postal service industry are organized according to the hub-and-spoke paradigm, so that parcel distribution centers play a crucial role to consolidate the parcel flows to full truckloads. In these terminals, inbound trucks are unloaded at gates, shipments are identified, sorted by the central sortation conveyor syste...