Document Type

Research Paper

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

In warehouses, storage replenishment operations involve the transportation of items to capacitated item slots in forward storage area from reserve storage. These items are later picked from these slots as their demand arises. While order picking constitutes the majority of warehouse operating costs, replenishment operations might be as costly in warehouses where pick lists generally consist of only a few lines (e.g., order fulfillment warehouses). In this study, we consider the storage replenishment problem in a parallel-aisle warehouse, where replenishment and order picking operations are carried out in successive waves with time limits. The aim is to determine the item slots that will be replenished and the route of the replenishment worker in each replenishment wave, so as to minimize the total labor and travel costs, and ensure the availability of items at the start of the wave they will be picked. The problem is analogous to the inventory routing problem due to the inherent trade-o between labor and travel costs. We present complexity results on different variants of the problem and show that the problem is NP-hard in general. Consequently, we use a heuristic approach inspired by those from the inventory routing literature. We use randomly generated warehouse instances to analyze the elect of different storage policies (random and turnover-based) and demand patterns (highly skewed or uniform) on replenishment performance, and to compare the proposed replenishment approach to those in practice.

Comments

Paper 29

Publication Title

Progress in Material Handling Research: 2016

ISBN

9781882780191

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