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Title : Innovative Aisle Configurations for Unit-Load Warehouses
Date : Oct 15, 2007
Speaker : Russell Meller, Hefley Professor of Logistics and Entrepreneurship
Affiliation : Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas
Abstract
Unit-load warehouses are used to store items---typically pallets---that can be stowed or retrieved in a single trip. In the traditional, ubiquitous design, storage racks are arranged to create parallel picking aisles, which force workers to travel rectilinear distances to picking locations. We consider the problem of arranging aisles in new ways to reduce the cost of travel within these warehouses. Our models produce innovative designs with piecewise diagonal cross aisles, and with picking aisles that are not parallel. One of the designs promises to reduce the expected distance that workers travel by more than 20 percent for warehouses of reasonable size. We also develop a theoretical bound that shows that this design is close to optimal. This talk will examine these designs and report on efforts to date to apply them in practice.
Biosketch
Russell D. Meller holds the title of the Hefley Professor of Logistics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Arkansas . He joined the Department of Industrial Engineering in 2005 after six years on the faculty at Virginia Tech, where he most recently held the title of Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering in the Grado Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. He joined Virginia Tech after seven years on the faculty at Auburn University . He receive his B.S.E., M.S.E., and Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan . He currently serves as Director of the Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution and Deputy Director of the newly-formed Center on Innovation in Healthcare Logistics. His research interests include facility logistics, facilities layout and location, automated material handling systems, and operations research applications in forestry. He co-authored a paper that won the 2003--2004 Best Paper Award for IIE Transactions on Design & Manufacturing. In 2006 a paper that he authored won the inaugural Outstanding Material Handling & Logistics Research Paper Award, awarded by the College-Industry Council on Material Handling Education. And in 2007, a conference paper that he co-authored won the best paper in the facility logistics track at the Industrial Engineering Research Conference. His research has been supported by over thirty grants from government agencies (including six from NSF) and companies in many industries. He is the immediate Past President of the College-Industry Council for Material Handling Education, having served as President for 2004--2005.
