A Text-Granulation Clustering Approach With Semantics for E-Commerce Intelligent Storage Allocation

With the hot rise and increasing popularity of e-commerce and online shopping, exponentially growing orders require to be picked up timely. In the order-based warehouse picking process, more intelligent optimization methods are urgently demanded to meet the maturity of robot technology. Due to the wide variety of SKUs (stock-keeping units) in warehouses, direct analysis based on orders can hardly get strong correlations among SKUs. Since orders and SKUs usually are presented in text form files, this paper proposes a clustering optimization algorithm based on text information granules which makes full use of context information and semantics. Storage assignment is determined by clustering SKUs first and then performing correlation analysis on the clustering results according to orders. The algorithm can give the semantic description of each cluster so that the clustering process is interpretable and transparent. Extensive experiments on a distribution center of a clothing production enterprise indicate 40.5 to 57.9% improvement in the average order picking distance compared with the ABC classification.