Abstract
A traditional bucket brigade picking protocol is limited in how much advantage it can take of intelligent item storage assignments since the team must walk from the start of the pick line to the end for each order. We explore how, in contrast, a truncated bucket brigade protocol can naturally exploit a storage assignment strategy by allowing the team to truncate the pick line, by use of some technology, to where the actual picks for each order are required. We derive expressions for the expected production rate for both a traditional and truncated bucket brigade for three di erent classes of storage pro les: a uniform (random) pro le, a class of volume-based storage (VBS) pro les (using Pareto curves), and a class of class-based storage (CBS) pro les. We nd that a truncated bucket brigade protocol can achieve substantial gains in productivity by reducing the amount of walking necessary by the team.