Evaluating Chevron aisle design in unit load warehouses with multiple pickup and deposit points

Abstract

Warehousing is becoming more important in the supply chain management than before because of increasing competitiveness in market. Efficient warehouse management has become a critical factor that affects customer satisfaction. Especially managing the lead-time in a warehouse for preparation of a customer order has become one of the critical issues for warehouse managers. Order delivery time in a warehouse is affected by all warehouse activities such as unloading trucks storing and picking products packaging and shipping. The most critical activities are storing and picking because they are the most time consuming activities. Travel time for storing and picking activities depends on aisle layout of the warehouse. Therefore aisle design in a warehouse becomes a research field for researchers. In this study the effect of multiple P&D point on the performance of Chevron design under various warehouse sizes and under different material flow policies is investigated. A mathematical model is constructed in continuous warehouse space and then the expected travel time in a discrete warehouse is calculated. As a result Chevron design outperforms the equivalent traditional design when there are a few number of P&D points and central P&D points have higher material flows than others in warehouse that have 3/1 width/height shape ratio.