To relieve human order pickers from unproductive walking through a warehouse, parts-to-picker systems deliver demanded stock keeping units (SKUs) toward picking workstations. In a wide-spread parts-to-picker setup, a crane-operated automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) delivers bins with...

Component commonality - the use of the same version of a component across multiple products - is being increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...