ANALYSIS OF A WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM BY MEANS OF SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

The supply chains for perishable products are nowadays affected by significant wastes and losses. Their management hence requires optimized approaches in order to remove such inefficiencies. In particular optimized warehouse management policies is a well established research topic which has been recently enriched with specific formulations for deteriorating stocks and shelf life based picking rules. In such context the proposed research aims at investigating the optimal warehouse management policy, taking into account the effects of uncertainty by means of simulation and approaching the effect of optimal picking rules. In the proposed approach, on the basis of a Weibull deterioration process, the optimal order quantity is calculated taking into account the deterioration cost, and the performance of the system is analyzed taking into account the inherent variability in the quality of the products entering the cold chain. The numerical application developed confirms the effectiveness of the model proposed.