A REAL-TIME SYNCHRONIZED ZONE ORDER PICKING SYSTEM FOR BALANCING PICKERS' WORKLOAD

With the rapid development of e-retailer, the process of order picking has being more labor-intensive. The synchronized zone order picking system is one of the effective policy to improve the productivity. But the problem of imbalance workload is always a difficult issue in this system. We propose an information system framework of the real-time synchronized zone order picking (R-SZOP) for balancing pickers’ workload by using the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. With the help of the RFID, we can get the item location information timely. A mathematical model is also built to estimate the throughput time and the workload of each zone. Experimental study is proposed to evaluate the model according to small, middle and large scale order cases. The results proved the feasibility of the R-SZOP system in practice.