Aisle configurations for unit-load warehouses

Abstract

Unit-load warehouses are used to store items—typically pallets—that can be stowed or retrieved in a single trip. In the traditional, ubiquitous design, storage racks are arranged to create parallel picking aisles, which force workers to travel rectilinear distances to picking locations. We consider the problem of arranging aisles in new ways to reduce the cost of travel for a single-command cycle within these warehouses. The proposed models produce alternative designs with piecewise diagonal cross aisles, and with picking aisles that are not parallel. One of the designs promises to reduce the expected distance that workers travel by more than 20% for warehouses of reasonable size. We also develop a theoretical bound that shows that this design is close to optimal.

Keywords:

• Warehousing
• aisle design
• unit-loads
• material handling

Acknowledgements

This study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants DMI-0600374 and DMI-0600671. We also thank Don Eisenstein of the University of Chicago and Richard Francis of the University of Florida for many helpful comments on an early draft of this work.