An improvement of a beam search method for warehouse storage allocation planning problems minimizing the number of operations and the aggregated number of products for each customer

The storage allocation planning problem in warehouse management is to determine the allocation of products to the storage space and intermediate operations for retrieving products so as to minimize the number of operations, and maximize the collected number of products for each customer when the sequence of requests for inlet and retrieval operations are given. In this paper, we propose an efficient beam search method for generating a near optimal solution with a reasonable computation time. A heuristic procedure is also proposed in order to reduce a search space in the beam search method by using the information of subsequent inlet and retrieving requests. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by comparing the results with the optimal solution derived by solving an MILP problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by solving an actual large-sized problem consisting of more than 3000 operations.