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Uta Mohring

Operations management in urban mobility and logistics

Context-aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines for Warehouse Optimization


Working paper


Janik Bischoff, Anne Meyer, Uta Mohring, Fabian Dunke, Maximilian Barlang, Özge Nur Subas, Hadi Kutabi, Stefan Nickel, Kai Furmans
2026

arXiv
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APA   Click to copy
Bischoff, J., Meyer, A., Mohring, U., Dunke, F., Barlang, M., Subas, Ö. N., … Furmans, K. (2026). Context-aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines for Warehouse Optimization.


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Bischoff, Janik, Anne Meyer, Uta Mohring, Fabian Dunke, Maximilian Barlang, Özge Nur Subas, Hadi Kutabi, Stefan Nickel, and Kai Furmans. “Context-Aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines for Warehouse Optimization” (2026).


MLA   Click to copy
Bischoff, Janik, et al. Context-Aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines for Warehouse Optimization. 2026.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{janik2026a,
  title = {Context-aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines for Warehouse Optimization},
  year = {2026},
  author = {Bischoff, Janik and Meyer, Anne and Mohring, Uta and Dunke, Fabian and Barlang, Maximilian and Subas, Özge Nur and Kutabi, Hadi and Nickel, Stefan and Furmans, Kai}
}

Order fulfillment in manual picker-to-goods warehouses involves interconnected decisions such as item assignment, order batching, and picker routing. While integrated models capture interactions between these decisions, practical warehouse systems often require decomposed approaches due to organizational boundaries, differing responsibilities, or limited data availability. Existing studies primarily evaluate algorithms for isolated subproblems or fixed subproblem combinations for specific warehouse settings, but lack a general mechanism to determine applicable algorithm configurations, compose them into valid solution pipelines, and assess their performance.

With Context-Aware Synthesis of Optimization Pipelines (CASOP), we propose a framework for constructing and evaluating context-specific optimization pipelines and apply these to order fulfillment. The framework comprises:  (1) a modular repository of algorithms for common order fulfillment problems; (2) semantic data and algorithm cards to describe warehouse context and algorithm requirements; (3) a taxonomy that structures order fulfillment problems into relevant subproblems; (4) a pipeline synthesizer that identifies applicable algorithms for a given warehouse context and composes all valid optimization pipelines; and (5) a pipeline evaluator that assesses all resulting pipelines. 
We demonstrate the framework on 7 benchmark instance sets covering four problem classes, resulting in 1,063,044 valid pipelines. The framework supports researchers and practitioners in designing, automatically synthesizing, and selecting valid, high-performing algorithmic pipelines for warehouse operations. The software is open-source and available at this https URL and this https URL


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