The problem of shared storage: exact and heuristic methods

The shared storage assignment policy, contrary to the dedicated one, allows a rack slot to receive units from different products or classes of products. This type of storage can lead to substantial savings in space and travel time. The authors focus on the problem of minimizing travel time for the context where motion cycles are simple, non-interleaved, and where information is available at the beginning of the horizon. They propose and apply an exact method for medium size problems. Then, the authors propose and analyse a very efficient heuristic method for large scale problems.