EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1480. Selecting and packing bins – a human perspective

Invited abstract in session MD-11: Behavioral Decision Analysis III, stream Behavioural OR.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 12 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Johannes Kuchler
2. Leon Binder
Deggendorf Institute of Technology
3. Michael Scholz
Deggendorf Institute of Technology

Abstract

The exponential growth of e-commerce in the past years has led to an increase in packages. Amazon, the biggest player in e-commerce, has packed and shipped approximately 7.7 billion packages in 2021. To handle that many packages, it is of utmost importance for e-commerce companies to optimize the packing process.
The packing process consists of two decisions typically made by humans: the selection of the best-fitting bin for a given order and the packing of all articles of that order into the bin. There has been little research into how people make these decisions. We conducted two experiments to study the driving forces on the two decisions.
In the first experiment, we varied the amount and heterogeneity of the available bins and the articles to be packed to examine the influence of these factors on the duration and quality of the bin selection process. We found, among other interesting insights, that the decision duration is, contrary to what is expected, not influenced by the heterogeneity of articles.
In the second experiment, we varied the number and heterogeneity of articles to be packed into a predefined bin to examine the influence on the packing duration. Key findings of this experiment are that humans exclusively start by packing the largest item and that packing an additional article increases the packing time by 4.3seconds on average.
Our findings contribute to the understanding and optimizing the packing process.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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