Optimising Warehouse Order Picking Through An Integrated Harmony Search and Simulated Annealing Algorithm: Application For A Food Packaging Manufacturer

Nowadays, logistics is becoming highly competitive to increase profit and provide improved customer services.Efficient logistics management reduces business costs, providing competitive customer service.Therefore, the optimal storage location assignment could provide an effective solution such as maximises the performance of the order-picking process by reducing lead times and total storage travelling distances.This paper presented a novel integrated metaheuristics approach by combining harmony search (HS) and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms to optimise storage assignment in a food packaging warehouse and minimise order-picking time.The proposed HSSA algorithm reduced average route duration by 77.21% and cut total annual labour costs by 83.03% compared with the current layout, generating an effective storage location procedure with labour productivity improved by 335.85%.The revised configuration also reduced total carbon emissions from 9,160 to 7,327 kgCO2.