Warehouse-design Support considering Seasonal Products

In this paper, a design problem for an automated warehouse which deals with seasonal products is discussed. The warehouse-design problem is to determine the number of machines used in a warehouse and the flow among the equipment. This problem is usually solved with experimental and intuitional approaches. However, conventional approaches take large amounts of time, and the design depends on designers' experienced skill. In addition, some warehouse deals with seasonal products, and if the amount of shipment exceed the throughput of auto-warehouse system, extra seasonal labors are needed in order to compensate warehouse system throughput. Therefore, when designing a warehouse, not only initial investment but operational cost (payment for seasonal labors) should be considered. However, this kind of seasonal cost is not considered in the conventional design approaches. In order to shorten the design process and give a theoretical guideline to the design, we propose a new design method using an extended network flow model. We then evaluate the feasibility of the model using real data and confirm the effect of the proposed method. After that, we examine the possibility to apply the proposed method to the design of a warehouse which deals with seasonal products.