The Picking and Packing Problem in Buy-Online-Pick-up-in-Store Retailing

With the rapid increase of digitization and desire for contactless shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, online grocery sales keep growing fast. Correspondingly, optimized policies for order picking are nowadays central in omnichannel supply chains, not only within dedicated warehouses but also in grocery stores while processing online orders. In this work, we apply the Buy-Online-Pick-up-in-Store concept and optimize the in-store picking and packing procedure.The approach we propose, which is based on two mathematical programming models, guides pickers on how to organize articles into bags while collecting items. In this way bags are filled up evenly and they are ready to be handled to the customers at the end of each picking task, with no further rearrangement needed.