Resumen de Storage location assignment of steel coils in a manufacturing company: an integer linear programming model and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure

Emrah B. Edis, Ozlem Uzun Araz, Ozgur Eski, Rahime Sancar Edis

• Warehouse operations have a signifcant role to survive in today’s competitive world.

  Hence, companies introduce various solutions to improve efciency of warehouses which is mainly afected by the performance of storage operations. This study deals with a real-life storage location and assignment problem encountered in a fastener company where several orders consisting steel coils are to be assigned into storage areas. Three individual objective functions; minimizing the number of lanes to be used, minimizing area usage, and maximizing volume utilization are considered. For the investigated problem, frst, an integer linear programming (ILP) model is developed. Then, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) which provides quick and efcient solutions is proposed. The proposed methods are applied to the real problem case and the results are compared with the current storage assignment. Moreover, through an extensive computational study, the performances of proposed methods are evaluated on a set of test problems with diferent range of characteristics. The computational results show that the ILP model proves optimality in most of the problem instances within reasonable computation times, while the GRASP gives quick solutions with small optimality gaps.