Intelligent system for selection of order picking technologies

The material handling industry in order to increase the productivity and quality of the order picking process has developed various technical or technological equipment. Therefore, to establish the right technology for every specific business context is a decision that need to be evaluated in a right way. The purpose of this paper is to create an intelligent decision model to select the most appropriate order picking technology. The present study shows an artificial neural network (ANN) trained with the results of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The weighting of the determining criteria and the prioritization of the different technologies from several experts are obtained through the AHP, while the artificial neural network is used to automate the decision process. The designed ANN can synthesize expert judgments and then predict the prioritization of order picking technologies.