OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) as well as the impact of the occupation of waste picking on complaints of MSDs among waste pickers. The study attempts to understand the risk factors for MSDs in various areas of the body. DESIGN A cross-sectional household survey was conducted using a case-control design. The survey instrument for measuring musculoskeleta...

Colours are three dimensional data. However, all commercial colour pickers project three-dimensional (3-D) colour spaces into two dimensional (2-D) palettes. The projection often results in a set of colours perceptually inappropriate to describe the data they present. This paper initially compares several popular 2-D colour pickers and then describes some novel colour pickers which allow colour...

Both the Vogel Spindle and Spanish Bush systems will allow for the development of a “pedestrian orchard”. A pedestrian orchard is defined as an orchard where two-thirds of the crop can be harvested from the ground, without the use of tall ladders (Fig. 1). Harvesting fruit from the ground greatly enhances worker productivity. In a study that I conducted in The Dalles, Oregon pickers were able t...

Background: Rabies is a zoonotic disease and many vulnerable sections like rag pickers and municipality workers neglect animal bites due to ignorance of their potential deadly outcomes. Stray dogs abound in garbage pits and this population is exposed to their attacks. It should be a mandate for municipalities to help protect their sanitary workforce, especially rag pickers, from deadly infectio...

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for routing order pickers in manual warehouses and optimizing the total distance covered. The proposed approach is an adaptation of the recent water wave optimization (WWO) algorithm, a nature-inspired algorithm based on the shallow water wave theory. The algorithm is tested on a rectangular 1-block warehouse, with 12 aisles and 45 storage locations per...

The Single-Picker Routing Problem deals with the determination of sequences according to which items have to be picked in a distribution warehouse and the identification of the corresponding paths which have to be travelled by human operators (order pickers). The Single-Picker Routing Problem represents a special case of the classic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and, therefore, can also be m...

In manual order picking systems, order pickers walk or ride through a warehouse in order to collect items requested by customers. The performance of such a system is significantly dependent on its layout which determines the lengths of the order pickers’ tours and the corresponding picking times. Whereas for classic warehouse layouts all picking aisles are arranged in parallel to each other, in...

A unique controlled field experiment investigates order picking performance (in terms of productivity and quality). We examined three manual picker-to-parts order picking methods (parallel, zone, and dynamic zone picking) under two different incentive systems (competitionbased versus cooperation-based) for pickers with different regulatory foci (prevention-focus versus promotion-focus). The stu...