Warehouse design and control: Framework and literature review

Warehouse organization

Process flow at the design stage

Reception process - Assignment of trucks to the docks

Storage process - particular location for each product

Order preparation process - Selection areas

Shipping process - orders and trucks are
assigned to the docks

Allocation of tasks to personnel and
equipment are addressed by operator

Warehouse resources

Storage unit

Storage system

Retrieval of items

Computer system

Material handling equipment for preparation

Warehouse processes

The receiving process

The storage process

Orderpicking

Shipping area

Warehouse design methods

Hierarchical level:

- Strategic
- Functional
- Operational.

Solutions chosen at a higher level provide the limitations for lower-level design problems.

Recognize the relationships between problems, to avoid suboptimal solutions

Warehouse performance criteria

Investment and operating costs

Mixing volume and flexibility

Performance

Storage capacity

Response time

Order fulfillment quality

analysis oriented research

alternatives is fully known

easily modelled

can be quantified

the ef€fects can be quantified

design oriented research

is often complex

can be combined in multiple ways

are difficult to quantify

can at best be partial

policies cannot be isolated

Warehouse literature overviews

most research seemed to concentrate on rather
limited problems

important gaps in the research fieelds existed

Warehouse design methods

Ashayeri and Goetschalckx provide a step-wise general design procedure

Duve and Bocker propose a step-wise design 
method

Yoon and Sharp suggest an elaborate conceptual procedure for the design of an orderpick system

Frazelle and Hackman provide an empirical study concerning the evaluation of warehouses

Rink and Waibel describe Lasys, a German decision support system for warehouse design

Warehouse design problems: Strategic level

A limited number of publications deal
with problems in the second cluster.

Oser provides an analysis of an automated transfer
car storage

Most publications analyze the performance of a
warehouse in order to be able to compare the
system with alternative ones.

Warehouse design problems: Tactical level

Marnix and Sharp evaluate the performance of several con®gurations of a carousel system

Bozer and White consider end-of-aisle
orderpicking systems.

Karasawa and Ashayeri analyze
the AS/RS

In conclusion, many papers at the tactical level
concern the performance of, mostly automated,
warehousing systems.

Warehouse design problems: Operational level

Batching

Elsayed and Stern test 24 batching algorithms with the aid of simulation

Elsayed and Unal derive analytical expressions to evaluate
batching algorithms

Rosenwein analyzes the maximum throughput in a conventional warehouse

Storage policies

Goetschalckx and Ratli€ evaluate storage policies for block storage through an analytical study.

Marsh has been working on the same problem
but evaluates two alternative policies.

SubJarvis and McDowell propose a heuristic for
the storage policy in a conventional warehousetopic

Routing and sequencing

Gelders and Heeremans analyze routing in a
conventional warehouse

Hall and De Koster and Van der Poort determine
analytical expressions to evaluate the routing

Ratli€ and Rosenthal present an algorithm for the routing

Dwell point selection

Egbelu presents an algorithm for the dwell
point selection

Egbelu and Wu evaluate several dwell point
policies

Peters present an analysis to approximate the response time for multiple AS/RS configurations and dwell point policies.

Storing and sequencing

Graves evaluate the impact of sequencing
and class-based storage policies on
warehouse performance

Van Oudheusden analyze this problem
for a person-on-board AS/RS

Schwartz use simulation to approximate the
maximum throughput of an AS/RS

Miscellaneous

Sarker and Babu review the literature
concerning the operational control of AS/RS's

Van den Berg analyzes a number of
operational control problems

Overview

most papers seem to focus on isolated
warehouse organizational policies

the overall picture that emerges seems to
suggest that current research, although useful in itself

Strategic level

Long-term decisions

Process design

Selection of types of storage systems

Tactical level

Medium-term decisions

Dimensions of resources

Storage

System sizes

Number of employees

Operational level

Short-term decisions

Assignment and control of personnel and equipment problems.