Re-warehousing vs. healing: Strategies for warehouse storage location assignment

Since the 1960s researcher have developed various storage assignment strategies for different warehouse scenarios. Much of this research has been devoted to re-warehousing, which involves extensive re-arrangements akin to filling a warehouse from scratch. However, due to seasonal fluctuations in demand or product mix, operations managers need to periodically review item placement in practise and re-organize the warehouse to keep it operating efficiently. In this paper we demonstrate for a sample warehouse how applying a small number of cleanup tasks (=healing) every day will lead to a good total warehouse assignment over the course of many months and show that the results are competitive to re-warehousing.