Test instances for order picking problems
The test instances found here were the ones used in the following works:
Cristiano Arbex Valle, John E Beasley
and Alexandre Salles da Cunha
Modelling and solving the joint order batching and picker routing problem in inventories, presented in the ISCO 2016 conference
Optimally solving the joint order batching and picker routing problem, published in 2017 at the European Journal of Operational Research.
Order batching for picker routing using a distance approximation, currently submitted for publication (preprint available on ArXiv).
Images for illustration:
Test instances files:
- warehouse_8_1_3_1560:Description of layout and sparse graph representation of a warehouse with two blocks, eight aisles, three cross-aisles and containing 1560 different SKUs (storage keeping units).
- warehouse_8_0_3_1560:Description of layout and sparse graph representation of a warehouse with a single block, eight aisles, two cross-aisles and containing 1560 different SKUs (storage keeping units).
- warehouse_16_1_3_1560:Description of layout and sparse graph representation of a warehouse with two blocks, sixteen aisles, three cross-aisles and containing 1560 different SKUs (storage keeping units).
- warehouse_16_0_3_1560:Description of layout and sparse graph representation of a warehouse with a single block, sixteen aisles, two cross-aisles and containing 1560 different SKUs (storage keeping units).
- productsDB_1560_list: List of products.
- productsDB_1560_locations: A map of each product to each slot in the warehouse.
- orders.tar.gz: A tar.gz file containing many test instances with O = 5 to 50, but also including O = 75. Each file contains a number of orders and the list of products contained in each order, as well how many items of each product. The files have varying values for Delta and O, for more details please refer to one of the papers mentioned in the top.
- largeInstances.tar.gz: A tar.gz file containing large test instances (from O = 50 to 5000).
For a detailed description of the files above, please read this file.
For reproducing an instance with multiple blocks as reported in the papers above three files are required: warehouse_8_1_3_1560, productsDB_1560_locations and any file from orders.tar.gz . For an equivalent single block instance, simply replace warehouse_8_1_3_1560 with warehouse_8_0_3_1560. The other files are the same. Equivalently, for warehouses with 16 aisles, just replace warehouse_8_1_3_1560 or warehouse_8_0_3_1560 with warehouse_16_1_3_1560 or warehouse_16_0_3_1560 respectively.
The original Foodmart database can be found here.
The warehouse generator can be downloaded here. Both warehouse files above (single and multiple blocks) were generated with this script. Parameters can be changed inside the script itself. It was developed in PERL and can be used to generate warehouse layouts with different number of aisles, cross-aisles and able to hold any number of products. It is based on a previous version developed during the following work:
Theys, C., Bräysy, O., Dullaert, W., Raa, B. Using a TSP heuristic for routing order pickers in warehouses.
European Journal of Operational Research 200(3), 755--763 (2010)
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