| dc.description.abstract | In recent years; because of globalization, trade liberalization, the shortening of product life cycle, the emergence of supply chain management concept and the enhancement of customer service level, logistics has become an important issue to global business. However, there are more and more customers whose demand becomes low-volume and high-diversified. In response to this demand characteristic, volume of product inventory should be reduced by retailers, and low-volume, high-diversity, high-frequency delivery practice should be designed into retailers’ logistic system to satisfy customers and retailers. Therefore, the traditional multi-level distribution channel will be replaced by distribution center (DC). And many activities are carried out in the distribution center (DC). Among them, order picking is the critical one which leads to customer satisfaction. Moreover, order picking is labor intensive and high-cost activity which may consume as much as 55% of overall activity cost.
In traditional picking system, it can be observed that some pickers are idle while others are busy and some picking zones are blocked due to the excess of queue. In this study, we propose cooperation concepts and rules which make pickers in adjacent zones to help each other possible when some conditions are held. It can eliminate the load imbalance between pickers in different zones. To analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of those concepts and rules, the Arena 11.0 and SPSS 18.0 are adopted to construct the simulation model and to do the statistical analysis. Finally, best combinations under different conditions which bring the minimum total system time are found after the analysis of experiment results. The statistical analysis showed that the combination of (BT3*HBZ*HFB1*B3) increase performance by 31.281%, and the combination of (B4*NBT0*HBZ*HBF1) increase performance by 31.494%.
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