A Real-Time Picking and Sorting System in E-Commerce Distribution Centers

Order fulfillment is the most expensive and critical operation for companies engaged in e-commerce. E-commerce distribution centers must rapidly organize the picking and sorting processes during and after the transaction has taken place, with the ongoing need to create greater responsiveness to customers. Sorting brings a relatively large setup time, which cannot be well admitted by existing polling models. We build a new stochastic polling model to describe and analyze such systems, and provide approximate explicit expressions for the complete distribution of order line waiting time for polling-based order picking systems and test their accuracy. These expressions lend themselves for operations and design operations, including deciding between “pick-and-sort” or “sort-while-pick” processes, and warehouse performance evaluation

Solving Go for Rectangular Boards

In 2003, the solution for the 5×5 Go board was published in this journal. The current article presents the game-theoretic values for rectangular boards up to a surface of 30 intersections under Chinese rules. The result was achieved by improving the αβ-based solver MIGOS. Moreover, the article identifies errors in published human solutions by comparing them with our computer solutions

Learning to Predict Life and Death from Go Game Records

This paper presents a learning system for predicting life and death in the game of Go. Learning examples are extracted from game records. On average our system correctly predicts life and death for 88% of all blocks. Towards the end of a game the performance increases up to 99%. Clearly, such a predictor will be an important component for building a full-board evaluation function.