Overview

LoDI Ph .D. Research Assistant Luis Cardona introduced an analytical model for U-flow warehouses under a class-based storage policy. He and his colleagues have proven mathematically that the optimal shape of the warehouse and the location of the pick and deposit point are invariant to changes in product demand. They also showed that this holds true for most storage policies in practice. This paper is a formal effort to support the results previously found by simulation techniques presented in the warehousing literature.

Methodology

The authors propose an analytical optimization model to decipher the length and width of the warehouse and the location of the pick and deposit point to minimize the expected travel distance of picking or put-away operations.