Pick-up Optimization at the Warehouse for Production Orders:
In company X, final products are assembled based on customer specific workorders. Each work order is scheduled by the planning department, and once their schedule is set the warehouse receives an order to prepare the components that will be required to start that work order. Each work order requires around 30 components on average, and during a 12-hour shift the warehouse is expected to process 10 such orders. The warehouse uses a dynamic addressing system, so no item has a fixed address in the warehouse. Left unguided, the order pickup operation is observed to be very inefficient and slow. The team is expected to develop an algorithm that can generate a pickup route (ordering of warehouse addresses to pick items up) given a production order and the current addresses of the items in the warehouse.