Finding Interactions or Relationships Between Customer Orders for Building Better Batches by Means of an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm-based approach for the Online Order Batching Problem

Order-picking systems are very common in industry. In this warehouse environment an order batching consists of combining customer orders into picking orders. Order batching is a combinatorial issue because many customer orders arrive throughout the scheduling in real-world situations, therefore to find interactions or relationships between orders for building better batches is a difficult task. This paper introduces an estimation of distribution algorithm-based approach for the online order batching problem to guide the overall search process. The results show how the warehouse performance is improved by estimating relationships between orders. This approach is compared with others published in the literature.