Warehouse Operations

Project 1 Assignment

1.  Read “Research on warehouse operation: A comprehensive review” by Jinxian Gu, Marc Goetschalckx and Leon F. McGinnis in the European Journal of Operational Research 177 (2007) 1-21.
2. Write a brief summary (2-5 pages) of the article.  You should summarize the article in your own words where possible.  Occasional quotes from the article are acceptable, but you need to be convincing that you have read and understand the concepts.  Do not copy sentences from the article and use a thesaurus to change key words or phrases.  Your write-up should be type written and submitted to D2L by 5:00 PM on Monday April 4^th.

As a sample, you can follow the following outline:

Shipping and Receiving:

Discuss the key goals of Receiving and Shipping Operations.  What specific problems do the authors call out that are included in Receiving and Shipping Operations? 

Storage:

 Discuss the key goals of Storage and define the 3 fundamental questions the authors call out as storage related decisions.  For SKU-Department Assignment and Zoning, describe the problem being solved and the research focus areas discussed.

Discuss the Storage Location Assignment Problem and the 3 variations the authors call out.  How do they differ in terms of the problems being solved?

Order Picking:

Discuss the batching sub-problem of the order pick problem.  How does the seed algorithm work?  How is the “savings heuristic” different from the seed algorithm?  What is meant by “route closeness”?

Discuss what problem needs to be solved within routing and sequencing.  What is the difference between a traversal vs. return policy?  Discuss the unique issues with Conventional – multi-parallel-isle systems, Man-On-Board-AS/RS, Unit-Load-AS/RS and Carousel systems.  Describe the problems unique to each system and any differences discussed regarding problem solutions.

Describe the sorting problem and how it is accomplished if done after the pick operations.