Warehousing in the e-commerce era: A survey

Order picking (OP) activities, essential to logistics operations, are laborious and time-intensive. Humans are central actors in the OP process and determine both OP effectiveness and efficiency. Many researchers have developed models for planning OP activities and increasing the efficiencies of such systems by suggesting different warehouse layouts, OP routes or storage assignments. These studies have, however, ignored workers’ characteristics, or human factors, suggesting that they cannot be substantiated, which led to only partially realistic results. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for integrating human factors into planning models of OP activities and hypothesises that doing so improves the performance of an OP system and workers’ welfare. The framework is based on a systematic literature review that synthesises findings documented in the OP and human factors literature. The results of the paper may assist researchers and practitioners in designing OP systems by developing planning models ...

Incorporating human factors in order picking planning models: framework and research opportunities

Industry 4.0 and the human factor – A systems framework and analysis methodology for successful development

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and sustainability are recent buzzwords in manufacturing environments. However, the connection between these two concepts is less explored in the literature. In the current busi...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207543.2019.1660828

Industry 4.0 as an enabler of sustainability diffusion in supply chain: an analysis of influential strength of drivers in an emerging economy

Order picking (OP) is one of the most labour- and time-intensive processes in internal logistics Over the last decades, researchers have developed various mathematical planning models that help to increase the efficiency of OP systems, for example, by optimising storage assignments or by specifying routes for the order pickers that minimise travel distance in the warehouse Human characteristics that are often a major determinant of OP system performance have, however, widely been ignored in this stream of research This paper systematically evaluates the literature on manual OP systems and conducts a content analysis to gain insights into how human factors (HF) have been considered and discussed in the scientific literature The results of the analysis indicate that management-oriented efficiency criteria dominated prior research on OP, and that there is a clear lack of attention to HF in the design and management of OP systems This poses an opportunity for research and design of manual OP systems

W. P. Neumann

Papers

Incorporating human factors in order picking planning models: framework and research opportunities

Incorporating human fatigue and recovery into the learning–forgetting process

Modelling worker reliability with learning and fatigue

Modelling worker fatigue and recovery in dual-resource constrained systems

An integrated cost and worker fatigue evaluation model of a packaging process