Fishbone Layouts with Vertical Travel 

Overview

In 2009, Gue and Meller (2009) introduced the fishbone layout as a non-traditional aisle structure with up to 20% savings in travel distance for unit-load warehouses. In a new paper entitled “Detailed design of fishbone warehouse layouts with vertical travel,” LoDI Ph.D. student Luis Felipe Cardona Olarte and his colleagues Diego Soto, Leonardo Rivera, and Hector Martinez have advanced the state of the art by incorporating vertical travel into the labor cost model.

The paper shows how to answer questions such as

• How high should racks be?
• How many openings should each aisle contain? and
• What is the best angle for the diagonal aisles?

The goal is to make an optimal tradeoff between material handling cost and cost of space.

Methodology

The authors describe a non-linear integer optimization model to find the arrangement of openings in the fishbone layout that minimizes total operational cost (area and material handling costs). The paper offers a genetic algorithm to solve the model.