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Aisle designs in unit-load warehouses with different flow policies of multiple pickup and deposit points

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Abstract

This study focuses on investigating the best layouts of a unit-load warehouse for single-command operation. We propose a model for unit-load warehouses having a single cross aisle and multiple pickup & deposit (P&D) points located at the front side of the warehouse. The model is constructed in continuous space for single-command travel and allows the cross aisle and picking aisles to take any angle between 0 and π. We then search for the best aisle arrangements that minimize the expected single-command distance from a given varying number of P&D points under randomized storage policy. Additionally, we introduce three material flow policies to investigate the effect of usage density of P&D points on the design. We also investigate the effects of shape ratio on angles of aisles in the best designs. Last, we also solved a problem instance with unsymmetrically allocated P&D points to show how to use our proposed models. Therefore, we present that warehouses with width to depth ratio 3:1 are good for high number of P&D points. We also show that the best designs provide more savings in travel over the equivalent traditional design if flows are more concentrated around the central P&D point. The best-found designs also present that the single-command distance can be reduced to 8–20% based on the characteristics of the unit-load warehouse.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Logistics Program in Vocational School, Yasar University, 35100, Izmir, Turkey

    Yeliz Kocaman

  2. Business Administration, Yasar University, 35100, Izmir, Turkey

    Ömer Öztürkoğlu & Şevkinaz Gümüşoğlu

Authors
  1. Yeliz Kocaman
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  2. Ömer Öztürkoğlu
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  3. Şevkinaz Gümüşoğlu
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Correspondence to Yeliz Kocaman.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

See Table 12.

Table 12 Best-found solutions and expected travel distances in the equivalent one-block design
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Kocaman, Y., Öztürkoğlu, Ö. & Gümüşoğlu, Ş. Aisle designs in unit-load warehouses with different flow policies of multiple pickup and deposit points. Cent Eur J Oper Res 29, 323–355 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-019-00646-9

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