Concurrent manual-order-picking warehouse design: a simulation-based design of experiments approach
提出一种基于仿真的试验设计方法，同时考虑仓库吞吐量、规模、布局、运营政策和人力/推车等设计组件的相互依赖性和随机性，通过仿真分析发现水平布局和小型仓库表现更优。
The design of manual-order-picking warehouses is a combination of interdependent decisions with enormous possible varieties in design components. The strong interrelationship between these components, in addition to the dynamic and interconnected stochastic nature of the problem; necessitate the utilisation of a simultaneous simulation-based approach. This study proposes a concurrent simulation-based design of experiments approach for the design of manual-order-picking warehouses. The proposed approach can investigate all possible warehousing design combinations with their stochastic nature and interactions; hence, widening the search for performance improvement. The examined design components include warehouse throughput, size, layout, operational policies and manpower/carts. Furthermore, the presented approach captures the probabilistic nature of all the key warehouse functions of receiving, unloading, put away, storage, preparation and picking and shipping; and evaluates the performance of the studied designs using the cycle time for a stock keeping unit in the warehouse. Statistical analysis of the simulation results showed several interesting findings; horizontal layout was preferable over all other types of layouts and small size warehouses perform better than other large sizes. The study has also recommended using high throughput for traditional layout-small size warehouses.