Project CEMAPRE internal
| Title | Variants of the Family Traveling Salesman Problem |
| Participants | Raquel Bernardino (Principal Investigator) |
| Summary | Warehouse activities involve receiving, storing, order picking and shipping goods, with order picking, i.e., retrieval of items in the warehouse to fulfil customer orders, being the most costly warehouse activity. One of the operational decisions is the routing, which has been receiving a lot of attention from the scientific community. However, when analyzing the proposed research method, it is possible to see that only 28% of the existing literature propose mathematical programming formulations or metaheuristics. Additionally, it can also be seen that there is a lack of study of different formulations for the problem and the study of advanced exact methods, such as branch-and-cut. The increase in sales of e-commerce led companies to tailor their warehouses to directly serve the final customer demands in the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment. A common layout of warehouses dedicated to the B2C segment is mixed-shelve storage, which is a synonym of chaotic storage or scattered storage, where products with the same stock keeping unit (SKU) do not need to be stored together. A problem motivated by chaotic storage is the Family Traveling Salesman Problem (FTSP). Given a depot and a set of subsets of products with several SKUs, the objective of the FTSP is to determine the minimum cost route that begins and ends at the depot and collects a predefined number of products of each SKU. The FTSP was already addressed in the literature, however, there are variants of the FTSP with practical application that have never been address and may contribute to the literature on warehouse management. |