The deterministic product location problem under a pick-by-order policy

This paper treats the product location problem in warehouses, i.e., stock keeping units (SKUs) are to be assigned to storage positions in order to minimize the resulting picking effort when retrieving SKUs in a pick-by-order environment. We restrict our view on warehouses having a single cross aisle and show that already very simple layouts consisting of only a single rack lead to NP-hard optimization problems. In addition to a complexity analysis for different layouts, elementary solution procedures are introduced and tested. Finally, we investigate the robustness of our deterministic problem when facing erroneous input data.