Slotting methodology using correlated improvement for a zone‐based carton picking distribution system

This study presents slotting methodologies for a zone‐based carton picking distribution system (DC). The study involves a slotting problem: assigning SKUs to slots in the zone‐based carton picking DC in which we have predetermined the assignment of items into cartons (cartonization). First we present a mathematical formulation for solving the slotting problem. Due to the difficulty in solving large problems, we develop four two‐phase heuristics for the slotting problem. One of the heuristics presented solves the slotting problem using a simulated annealing improvement heuristic based on correlated interchange (SA‐C). Since the performance of the SA‐C heuristic depends on the correlation of items in the same carton, we also develop a correlated carton list generation methodology with SKUs correlation. Promising computational results are shown using the data representative of a large DC.