Research On Slotting Optimization In Pharmaceutical Automated Warehouse

With the development of modern machine technology and informationtechnology, more and more industries make use of automated warehouse;pharmaceutical logistics industry is no exception. Due to internal factors or externalfactors, pharmaceutical logistics centers need regular or irregular slottingoptimization. Because that slotting optimization can improve the efficiency of thegoods moving into and out of the warehouse, improve the rationality of thewarehouse layout, cut storage management costs, reduce time-consuming ofwarehouse staff spend in walking, it is getting more and more attention fromcorporations. At present, there are some researches on slotting optimization, but a lotof them is confused with cargo distribution. Based on this background, the papercome up with a model contains three objective functions which are improve theefficiency of the goods moving into and out of the warehouse, store related productstogether and decrease transportation time of moving products.Firstly, the paper reviewed domestic and foreign scholars’ research aboutpharmaceutical logistics centers and automated warehouse on four areas, which arereduce the cost of pharmaceutical logistics centers, automated warehouse, cargodistribution and slotting optimization. The paper analyzed the shortage aboutslotting optimization research, and come up with the research point of this study.Secondly, describes relevant theoretical knowledge about the automatedwarehouse storage spaces management, such as automated warehouse storage mode,storage spaces encoding regulation, goods coding methods, and then made adefinition about slotting optimization, described the need of slotting optimization,the principle and storage mode of automated warehouse storage, the significance ofslotting optimization. Then introduced the warehouse management process, proposedthe location of slotting optimization in warehouse management process,finallyaccording to the characteristics of the logistics for the pharmaceutical, proposedsome storage requirements about medical logistics center.Thirdly, pointing at the characteristics and requirements of pharmaceuticallogistics centers, the paper built a cargo optimization model, which consists of threeobjective functions, respectively are improve the efficiency of the goods moving intoand out of the warehouse, store related products together and decrease transportationtime of moving products.Then, to solve the model, this paper selected genetic algorithm which is appropriate to solve the multi-objective optimization problem and used matlab7.0programming model. In the programming process, using real-code to program,selection operator is roulette wheel selection method, crossover and mutationoperator selected uniform crossover operator and uniform mutation operator whichare suitable for real-coded.Finally, a small virtual automated warehouse was built, and the test exampleverified that the model is feasible. The results show that by adjusting the proportionof each objective function in fitness function, can obtain a satisfactory results, sothat the distribution of cargo can basically meet the model requirements.