Optimizing the Rearrangement Process in a Dedicated Warehouse
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Giraldo Gonzalez, German Eduardo | 2010
Determining the optimal storage assignment for products in a dedicated
warehouse has been addressed extensively in the Facility Logistics
literature. However, the process of implementing a particular storage
assignment given the current location of products has not received much
attention in the existing literature. Typically, warehouses use downtime or
overtime to remove products from their current location and move them to
the suggested location. This work presents the Rearrange-While-Working
(RWW) policy to optimize the process of rearranging a dedicated
warehouse. The RWW policy seeks to relocate products in a warehouse
from the initial arrangement to the optimal arrangement while serving a
list of storages and retrievals. This study considers three scenarios: (1)
when there is only one empty location in the warehouse and the material
handling equipment (MHE) is idle (i.e. reshuffling policy); (2) when there
is only one empty location in the warehouse under the RWW policy; (3)
when there are multiple empty locations in the warehouse under the RWW
policy. In the first case, the MHE can make any movement desired as it is
idle. In the other cases, the movements correspond to a list of storages and
retrievals that need to be served. In these cases it is assumed that products
can only be moved when they are requested. After being used, they are
returned to the warehouse. Several heuristics are presented for each
scenario. The proposed heuristics are shown to perform satisfactorily in
terms of solution quality and computational time.
LEER