Stok yerleştirme problemine benzetim-eniyileme tabanlı bir çözüm yaklaşımı: Otomotiv sektöründe bir dağıtım deposunun vaka analizi

Warehouses play a central role in any supply chain. Warehousing operations constitute around 25% of a company's overall expenses for logistics. About 55% of the warehouse operating cost is generated by travel activities during order-picking operations. Therefore, the total travel distance directly affects the cost of order-picking and put-away operations. The total travel distance can be reduced by designing an effective storage policy and by systematic allocation of storage spaces to products. In this thesis, we focus on the allocation of storage spaces to different products with various characteristics for unit-load, single-command, picker-to-part warehouses with multiple input/output ports. We propose a simulation-optimization based approach to solve the storage location assignment problem. In the proposed methodology, the simulation model is used for generating certain input parameters for the optimization model. Then, the optimization model returns the best storage space allocations for each product so as to minimize the total expected travel distance. We test our approach with a real data set obtained from a major automotive manufacturer in Turkey. Our results reveal that the proposed method may reduce the total travel distance by up to 12%.