On the suboptimality of full turnover-based storage

Abstract

Full turnover-based storage has been widely claimed to outperform the commonly used ABC class-based storage policy in terms of the resulting storage and retrieval travel time. In the first paper describing the full turnover-based policy, simultaneously implicitly assuming shared storage (that is to say storage space that can be used by other products once the original product's inventory is depleted) was modelled, since no specific space was reserved to store the maximum inventory of a product. However, full turnover-based storage is a dedicated storage policy where the storage space allocated to one product must be able to accommodate its maximum inventory level. Since then, many authors have cited the results of the full turnover-based storage policy while often overlooking its incompatible shared-storage assumption. This paper adapts classic travel time models to accommodate full turnover-based dedicated storage. We consider different warehousing system configurations such as square-in-time (SIT) and non-SIT racks, and speed acceleration and deceleration effects to calculate the storage/retrieval (S/R) machine's travel time. Surprisingly, but in line with practice, the results of the adapted travel time models show that random and class-based storage normally outperform full turnover-based storage.

Keywords:

• warehousing
• storage policies
• full turnover-based storage
• random storage

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' 100 Talents Program, the NWO career grant (NWO VENI 451-07-017) in the Netherlands, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 70821001, 71090401/71090400, 71110107024, 71161008, and 71131004), and the Chinese Scholarship Council's Cai Yuanpei Program (No. 26058PL).