An optimisation model and its effective beam search heuristics for floor-storage warehousing systems

Abstract

This paper presents an optimisation model and its effective solution technique using beam search heuristic for floor-storage warehousing systems. For a floor-storage system, storage can be accessed from the top of stacks only. The objective is to minimise the number of re-handling operations by optimally determining the storage location and by grouping products for each customer that fit a given sequence for receiving and retrieving operations. An integer programming model is formulated and an approximate solution technique based on the beam search method is proposed to solve the problem by incorporating effective heuristics to reduce the search space using future receiving and retrieving requests. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated for industrial warehousing problems in a steel plant with 58 storage areas involving more than 3000 retrieving operations. The proposed solution method is shown to be more efficient than the traditional branch-and-bound method for solving integer programming problems.

Keywords:

• warehousing
• floor-storage systems
• storage allocation
• beam search
• optimisation
• integer programming problems

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank JFE Steel Corporation for providing actual warehousing data and their efforts and discussions. The authors would particularly like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor for their constructive comments that helped to improve the quality of this paper.