Heuristic comparative assessment of non-conventional warehouse designs

Abstract

In the unit-load warehouse (UW) design, the aisle design problem dealing with storage space layout is the first among the three main problems. Several conventional and non-conventional designs have been proposed in the literature. In general, the assessment of UW designs is commonly carried out using analytical approaches. However, such an approach may be inadequate due to assumptions or approximations, making results unrealistic. Aiming to bridge this gap, this research develops an assessment framework that employs the FlexSim software for simulating the conventional, Flying-V and Fishbone designs based on a real case from a Philippine manufacturing company. Using a computer simulation, this research investigates factors not yet tractable with present analytical methods. The factors employed for the comparative assessment are "picking run-time", "travel distance", and "capacity". The results suggest that the Fishbone design provides the most advantage compared to the Flying-V and other conventional designs. With the proposed Fishbone design, the company is expected to save, on average, 52.39% of picking run-time, 32.25% travel distance, and increase storage capacity by 7.5%. The research findings are compared to previous studies based on analytical approaches.