Order picking is the problem of collecting a set of products in a warehouse
in a minimum amount of time. It is currently a major bottleneck in supply-chain
because of its cost in time and labor force. This article presents two exact
and effective algorithms for this problem. Firstly, a sparse formulation in
mixed-integer programming is strengthened by preprocessing and valid
inequalities. Secondly, a dynamic programming approach generalizing known
algorithms for two or three cross-aisles is proposed and evaluated
experimentally. Performances of these algorithms are reported and compared with
the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solver Concorde