Abstract
This article considers a two-block warehouse with low-level aisles having dedicated pickers who follow a return routing policy within the aisle. Travel distance models are formulated assuming a given product density distribution in aisles for multi-item picks. An analytical recursive procedure is developed to find optimal n-class partitions of each warehouse aisle. A range on the number of classes and number of picks for which class-based storage is an attractive option over the random storage policy is determined through a computational study. The article also presents an iterative hierarchical framework to simultaneously obtain pick list size, number of aisles, and class storage boundaries. A sensitivity analysis of optimal pick travel distance against important warehouse design parameters is presented.
Acknowledgement
The authors are thankful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments that improved the quality of the article.