Industry Expertise Heuristics for Dimensioning Shelf Space of Rack Storage Location in a Distribution Centre with Zone Picking

Appropriate product categorization in distribution centres is important for business success because of the possibility of intuitive product finding by the picker and increased product movement. Both of these factors result in the operational efficiency of the distribution centre. The goal of this paper is to explore a model of shelf space dimensioning of storage location on a rack with vertical and horizontal product categorization in a distribution centre, where the aim is to increase total product movement/profit from all shelves of the rack. This is controlled by a packer who must complete orders by getting the goods from shelves and picking them to the container. In this problem, we develop two heuristics and compare the archived results to the CPLEX solver. The average profit ratios of both heuristics are high and approximately equal to 99%. In 10 cases, optimal solutions have been found by heuristics. The total number of possible solutions to be checked for the largest instance was reduced from 1.33 ·10156 to 1.19 ·107 thanks to the heuristic rules.