| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 工業工程與管理學系 === 100 === Warehouse operation is an important factor for the efficient and effective supply chain management. Order picking process is the most laborious and most costly activity in a typical warehouse. Among those factors that affect the order picking efficiency, most research addresses the issues of the storage assignment and routing policy. The aisle configuration within storage areas is also an important factor but not many papers consider this factor. Motivated by this, a different aisle configuration is discussed with other major factors.
A recent trend in design of warehouse configuration is the consideration of different designs for the pick aisles and the cross aisles. Flying-V and fishbone layout are the two new configurations proposed in the literature. They can save the total travel distance in unit-load operation over the traditional aisle configuration. In this research, we developed another two similar configurations with PD point at the bottom left position, which could be considered as half of Flying-V and fishbone layout, respectively. Storage assignment strategy (random and turnover based) and warehouse operation (unit-load and order picking) are also considered to evaluate the performance of the new aisle configurations over the traditional layouts.
Three different experiments in different scenarios are conducted to evaluate the effect of the aisle configuration and storage assignment on the picking performance in this research. Four different demand distributions are also considered in the experiments. Based on the results, we found that the new aisle configuration with turnover based assignment can reduce the travel distance up to 26.16% and 20.37% for the single-command and dual command operation at the unit-load warehouses, respectively. Regarding the order picking operation, the traditional layout with a cross aisle can provide shortest travel distance. However, the fishbone and half-fishbone layout provide shorter distance when mixed size orders are picking. When implementing the new aisle configuration, one should observe that the travel savings are offset by a reduction in storage density. In the future, we could collect real data to test the performance of the new aisle configurations. Another possible extension is to evaluate multiple PD points and locate the best positions for these PD points.
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