This period’s research lecture is given by Son Tran, PhD candidate at the KE (Quantitative Economics) department in Operations Research. He will present his current research topic: Anticipatory Order Picking. If you’re interested in a preview of the lecture, Son summarised it below:

E-commerce activities put warehouses under high pressure. First, the smaller order sizes result in efficiency loss when retrieving the requested items from storage due to missing economies of scale, while the cost for handling and packaging of these smaller orders tends to be higher. Second, the very short delivery lead times require warehouses to respond to incoming customer orders within hours or even minutes. Because of this short planning horizon, customer demand is highly uncertain up to the moment that a customer places the order. Such a high degree of dynamism makes it more challenging to operate at minimum cost and easily leads to ad-hoc decisions and missed opportunities for optimization.

To deal with such a high degree of dynamism and uncertainty while ensuring high efficiency in our picking operations, we make use of anticipatory order picking (AOP). The core idea is to explicitly incorporate forecast information, provided by machine learning methods, and allow the picking of products even before they are actually ordered by the customer. As such, products can be picked when their cost (marginal travel time) is low, which results in a reduced total travel time compared to the situation in which products can only be picked once ordered. Our research also reveals that AOP leads to a better capacity utilization, a more balanced workload and an earlier completion time for picking all customer orders over the full planning horizon.

The lecture will take place at SBE, TS53 C-1.03, at 19:00.

For those interested in taking part in Vectum’s succession, we also organise a Board Information Session. During this info session, each board member will present their role and you’ll get the opportunity to ask questions and discuss with us.

The information session will also be in C-1.03 at 20:15.

The evening will end with drinks at the Preuverij. 🍻