Storage location assignment of steel coils in a manufacturing company: an integer linear programming model and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure.

Warehouse operations have a significant role to survive in today's competitive world. Hence, companies introduce various solutions to improve efficiency of warehouses which is mainly affected by the performance of storage operations. This study deals with a real-life storage location and assignment problem encountered in a fastener company where several orders consisting steel coils are to be assigned into storage areas. Three individual objective functions; minimizing the number of lanes to be used, minimizing area usage, and maximizing volume utilization are considered. For the investigated problem, first, an integer linear programming (ILP) model is developed. Then, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) which provides quick and efficient solutions is proposed. The proposed methods are applied to the real problem case and the results are compared with the current storage assignment. Moreover, through an extensive computational study, the performances of proposed methods are evaluated on a set of test problems with different range of characteristics. The computational results show that the ILP model proves optimality in most of the problem instances within reasonable computation times, while the GRASP gives quick solutions with small optimality gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]