Storage Assignment Using Nested Annealing and Hamming Distances

Johan Oxenstierna, Johan Oxenstierna, Louis van Rensburg, Peter Stuckey, Volker Krueger

2023

Abstract

The assignment of products to storage locations significantly impacts the efficiency of warehouse operations. We propose a multi-phase optimizer for a Storage Location Assignment Problem (SLAP) where solution quality is based on a distance estimate of future-forecasted order picking. Candidate assignments are first sampled using a Markov Chain accept/reject method. Future-forecasted pick-rounds are then modified according to the candidate assignments and solved as Traveling Salesman Problems (TSP). The model is graph-based and generalizes to any obstacle layout in 2D. Due to the intractability of the SLAP, methods are proposed to speed up search for strong solution candidates. These include usage of fast function approximation to find potentially strong samples, as well as restarts from local minima. Results show that these methods improve performance and that total travel distance can be reduced by as much as 30% within 8 hours of CPU-time. We share a public repository with SLAP instances and corresponding benchmark results on the generalizable TSPLIB format.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Oxenstierna J., van Rensburg L., Stuckey P. and Krueger V. (2023). Storage Assignment Using Nested Annealing and Hamming Distances. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES, ISBN 978-989-758-627-9, pages 94-105. DOI: 10.5220/0011785100003396

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icores23,
author={Johan Oxenstierna and Louis van Rensburg and Peter Stuckey and Volker Krueger},
title={Storage Assignment Using Nested Annealing and Hamming Distances},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,},
year={2023},
pages={94-105},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011785100003396},
isbn={978-989-758-627-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems - Volume 1: ICORES,
TI - Storage Assignment Using Nested Annealing and Hamming Distances
SN - 978-989-758-627-9
AU - Oxenstierna J.
AU - van Rensburg L.
AU - Stuckey P.
AU - Krueger V.
PY - 2023
SP - 94
EP - 105
DO - 10.5220/0011785100003396