Storage and Order Picking Process Design for Perishable Foods in a Cold Warehouse

Abstract

This study searches a suitable storage and retrieval policy resulting with efficient performance metrics in a cold warehouse located in Izmir. Due to the fact that the coldwarehouse involves perishable food products the policy that is searched by this work aims a storage and retrieval policy resulting with decreased process time in the system. Not only process time is aimed to be decreased but also we aim to decrease food waste in the warehouse. We define the storage and retrieval algorithms and simulate them to compare their performances. Furthermore warm up periods and confidence intervals has been defined for the average cycle time by using Output Analyzer tool of ARENA 16.0 commercial simulation software. Also a sensitivity analysis is performed to analyse the trade-off between product arrivals and demand distribution of product types. Finally a user-friendly decision support system is developed using Excel-VBA interface by embedding the proposed simulation models.