Inventory routing in a warehouse: The storage replenishment routing problem

Date

2021-01-01

Author

Çelik, Melih
Archetti, Claudia
Süral, Haldun

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

134
views

0
downloads

In warehouses, storage replenishment operations involve the transportation of items to capacitated item slots in the forward storage area from reserve storage. These items are later picked from these slots as demand arises. While order picking constitutes the majority of warehouse operating costs, efficient management of replenishment operations is important to ensure the availability of the items for picking and to decrease the operating costs due to replenishment, which might be particularly higher in warehouses with fast-moving items (e.g., e-commerce warehouses or retail distribution centers). In this paper, we define the storage replenishment routing problem in a parallel-aisle warehouse, where replenishment and order picking operations are carried out in successive cycles with time limits. The aim is to determine the item slots that will be replenished and the route of the replenishment worker in each replenishment cycle, so as to minimize the total travel time and ensure the availability of items at the start of the cycle they will be picked. We present complexity results on different variants of the problem and show that the problem is NP-hard in general. Consequently, we adapt a heuristic approach based on a priori routing and inspired by the literature on the inventory routing problem. We use randomly generated warehouse instances to analyze the effects of different a priori routing methods and demand skewness patterns on replenishment performance, and to compare the proposed approach to benchmarks that mimic practice.

Subject Keywords

Inventory routing, Order picking, Routing, Storage replenishment, Warehouse management

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85121978761&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/97080

Journal

European Journal of Operational Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2021.11.056

Collections

Department of Industrial Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The storage replenishment problem in rectangular warehouse Süral, Haldun; Çelik, Melih (2016-06-12) In warehouses, storage replenishment operations involve the transportation of items to capacitated item slots in forward storage area from reserve storage. These items are later picked from these slots as their demand arises. While order picking constitutes the majority of warehouse operating costs, replenishment operations might be as costly in warehouses where pick lists generally consist of only a few lines (e.g., order fulfillment warehouses). In this study, we consider the storage replenishment problem...
Energy minimizing order picker forklift routing problem Atashi Khoei, Arsham; Süral, Haldun; Tural, Mustafa Kemal (2022-01-01) The material handling systems used in warehouses involve important operations such as the usage of order picker forklifts. These order picker forklifts provide efficient utilization of the storage space by their ability in moving in narrow aisles and picking items from high level racks. Routing the order picker forklifts to pick ordered items belongs to the operational decision level and is done in high frequency. Therefore, finding an energy-efficient route for an order picker forklift can yield significan...
Inventory management through vendor managed inventory in a supply chain with stochastic demand Güneş, Hürdoğan; Savaşaneril Tüfekci, Seçil; Bayındır, Zeynep Pelin; Department of Industrial Engineering (2010) Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is a business practice in which vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished. VMI has attracted a lot of attention due to its benefits. In this study, we analyze the benefits of VMI in a supply chain consisting of a single retailer and a single capacitated supplier under stochastic demand. We propose a VMI setting and compare the vendor managed system with the traditional system to quantify the benefits of VMI. In o...
Drop test simulation of a munition with foams and parametric study on foam geometry and material Gerçeker, Bora; Ulaş, Abdullah; Parnas, Kemal Levend; Department of Mechanical Engineering (2012) Unintentional drop of munitions could be encountered during the storage, transportation, and loading processes. In such an impact, malfunctioning of crucial components of munitions is the worst scenario that may be encountered and level of loads should not reach to critical levels. From two possible methods, experimental one is not frequently applied owing to high cost of money and time. On the contrary, particularly in last couple of years, interest is shifted to numerical simulations such as finite elemen...
Energy Minimizing Order Picker Forklift Routing Problem Atashi Khoei, Arsham; Süral, Haldun; Tural, Mustafa Kemal (2022-07-03) The material handling systems used in warehouses involve important operations such as the usage of order picker forklifts. The order picker forklifts provide efficient utilization of the storage space by their ability in moving in narrow aisles and picking items from high racks. Routing the order picker forklifts to pick ordered items belongs to operational decision level done in high frequency. Therefore, finding energy-efficient routes for order picker forklifts can yield significant savings in energy con...

Citation Formats

M. Çelik, C. Archetti, and H. Süral, “Inventory routing in a warehouse: The storage replenishment routing problem,” European Journal of Operational Research, pp. 0–0, 2021, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85121978761&origin=inward.