ALLOCATING ITEMS TO AN AUTOMATED STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL-SYSTEM

To reduce material handling costs, distribution centers purchase automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS). It is often the case that the capacity of the AS/RS is insufficient to store all items. The distribution center must then decide which items to assign to the AS/RS and in what quantities they will be stored. In this paper, we develop a heuristic procedure to solve this problem. A priori and a posteriori tests of the data for the optimality of th is heuristic procedure are provided. The proposed procedure is tested with data gathered fran a naval supply center. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.