A process model of expertise in the design of warehousing and distribution systems

An ideal warehousing and distribution system has no inventory and operates with minimal handling. In an attempt to achieve this ideal, expert designers rely on their intuition, together with analytical models and procedures formalized over years of experience. Understanding the processes that experts employ to realize their designs can have great benefits, for instance, in developing computational tools to assist in design. We have conducted an ethnographic study of an expert design team during actual system design. In this paper, we describe our observations and a process model of design