Title: Design, storage location allocation and routing: a comprehensive comparison

Authors: Mohammadnaser Ansari; Mohsen Nikfar; Jeffrey S. Smith

Addresses: Supply Chain Decision Science, Chick-fil-A, 5200 Buffington Rd., Atlanta, GA, 30349, USA ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

Abstract: With the current disturbance in the supply chain and sudden shift towards e-commerce with the onset and continued impact of COVID-19, warehousing and warehouse efficiency is once again in the spotlight. Analysing the performance of various methods and approaches in designing, planning, and operating a warehouse has been a subject of interest for researchers. This paper investigates the effect of four main factors in warehouse operations on order-picking total fulfilment time. The number of cross-aisles, storage location assigning approaches, location ranking methods, and routing methods have been examined using a real order data sample. Later, their effect on the order picking time in a traditional parallel aisle warehouse has been investigated. The authors also performed a full analysis of variance (ANOVA) and sensitivity analysis to find the best combination of design, storage location assigning problem (SLAP), and routing, for a set of order data.

Keywords: warehouse; routing; design; storage location assigning problem; SLAP; performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPSCM.2023.133646

International Journal of Business Performance and Supply Chain Modelling, 2023 Vol.14 No.3, pp.301 - 327

Received: 11 Sep 2021
Received in revised form: 23 Jun 2022
Accepted: 02 Aug 2022
Published online: 27 Sep 2023 *

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