Pallet Distribution Affecting a Machine’s Utilization Level and Picking Time

Space and labor are the two internal resources within a warehouse or cross-dock center which seek attention. Meaningful efforts in optimizing these two resources can reduce the operational cost or time of the goods delivery. The timely allocation of resources to order picking not only reduces the makespan and operational time but can also evade delay. In decentralized settings, where all the information is not properly shared between the players of the supply chain, miscommunication results in delays in product delivery. In this study, efforts were made to determine the pallet quantity of different product types in an order quantify when there is a gap in information shared and, based on that, the allocation of material handling devices or pickers was conducted. Each handling device is bounded by a workload to eliminate the option of idle resources and ensure it is utilized properly. A mixed integer linear programming model was formulated for this study and was solved using Lingo. Numerical experiments were performed under varying resource numbers and pallet quantities to investigate the circumstances where the number of pallet types and allocation of machines have the highest benefit. The results confirm that a change in the pallet quantity of the products increases the total picking time. However, an increase in the number of handling devices minimizes the level of over-utilization of a particular machine.