A Proposed Hybrid Method for the Storage Location Assignment and Picker Routing Problem

Warehouse management is a strategic pillar in the modern supply chain, where order picking is the most labor- and cost-intensive activity. A significant part of efficient management depends on the intelligent interaction of the positioning of items in the inventory with the routing of the collectors. Note that treating these two processes sequentially and independently can generate suboptimal solutions. In the context of exploring alternatives for process integration in warehouse management, this work develops and validates a hybrid matheuristic algorithm, i.e., the integration of metaheuristics (such as local search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms) with mathematical programming algorithms. 

This methodological integration is justified because the strictly exact methods that guarantee optimality often require a prohibitive computational time of resolution when it comes to, for example, practical instances of e-commerce. On the other hand, traditional heuristics alone can fail to explore the solution space comprehensively in problems that present relative computational complexity. The proposed applied methodology encompasses the formulation of mathematical programming models based on the literature, thus establishing a robust parameter of comparison