A determination method of product allocation schedule for warehouse management

The warehousing system consists of several storage space, pallets and overhead crane conveying the products. Due to the complexity of the movements of the products in warehousing system, it is difficult to obtain a reasonable schedule for product allocation. In this paper, we propose a determination method for product allocation schedule in automated warehousing system by using the simulation-based optimization method. The simulation module is composed of product receiving and product picking simulator. Several heuristic rules are investigated by using the developed simulator. It was confirmed that the location of received products highly influences the handling cost for picking the products and total distance traveled by the overhead crane. In order to optimize the storage location of products, the optimization system using simulated annealing method is also developed. The performances of a large scale problem derived by the proposed system are considerably improved compared with those derived by heuristic algorithm.