THE FEASIBILITY OF WAREHOUSE STORAGE ASSIGNMENT OPTIMIZATION USING STRESS FLUX AND FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Given the necessity of fundamental and structural changes in the production and manufacturing industries to fulfill the industry 4.0 paradigm, the proposal of new ideas and frameworks for operations management of production and manufacturing system is inevitable. This challenge is enhanced by the essential need for the development of industrial platforms to fulfill the requirements of fundamental changes in industry 4.0 paradigm like sustainability, agility, rehabilitation, and flexibility. Thus, through the realization of new technologies and the necessity of increasing the pace and accuracy of productivity, a fundamental transformation must be enabled for many traditional concepts and operations management methods to be upgraded for the requirements of modern digital production and manufacturing industries. One of the dominant areas for this transformation is believed by researchers to be modern storage problem. This research focuses on traditional methods proposed for storage assignment problem and struggles for new methods and definitions for industry 4.0 based storage assignment concepts. At the first step, the paper proposes a new definition of storage assignment and layout problem for fulfilling the agility of storage mechanism in terms of automated store and retrieval process (AS/RS) in modern inventories. Then, considering the shortcomings of traditional algorithms for storage assignment problem, the paper contributes a new algorithm inspired from mechanical engineering discipline to analysis and optimization of storage assignment problem. The proposed new algorithm backed by stress distribution analogy and the help of Finite Element Method and minimum total potential energy theory proposes a new model for storage assignment optimization. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of calculation time and the quality of optimum answer is analyzed and investigated through numerical examples. Also, the results of illustrating the advantages of the new algorithm in comparison with traditional algorithms are discussed considering the requirements of industry 4.0 paradigm.