A Precious Mess: On the Scattered Storage Assignment Problem

摘要

Induced by the rise of online retailing new storage strategies have evolved, designed to meet the demands of e-commerce warehousing. Although many of these new approaches have established over the last few years, literature on basic planning problems in these environments can be found only rarely. This paper points out the special needs of e-commerce warehousing and details the scattered storage strategy (also known as mixed-shelves storage) where unit loads are unbundled and single items are stored at multiple positions within the warehouse. This way, an item of an ordered product is always close by and the unproductive walking time of pickers is reduced. Based on the paper of Weidinger and Boysen (Scattered storage: how to distribute stock keeping units all around a mixed-shelves warehouse. Working Paper Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, 2015) [8], the scattered storage assignment problem is presented and the processes in a scattered storage warehouse are described.