A heuristic approach to the warehouse management problem: a real case study

In this paper, a new heuristic approach is proposed to solve a real Storage Problem (SP) defined by a Tunisian company, SOTIM, that aims at minimising the number of used racks (bins) for the arrangement of the end products, 'mattresses' (items), each with a given size (width, height, length) and characteristics (ranges, colours, quantity). This heuristic is analysed for three special cases: 1) the number of bins is unlimited; 2) the number of bins is fixed; 3) the number of bins to be added. The proposed approach is verified by real data and the results obtained imply a significant improvement as compared to the integer programming model proposed.