Decision Support System (DSS) for Warehouse Design and Management

Throughout the supply chain, distribution centers or warehousing systems allow to match producers and demand, to respond seasonality and change, playing a significant role to reach efficacy and costs reduction. Unfortunately, the storage system design entails a wide number of different decisions and leverages involving many structural parameters and operative issues, that can seriously affect the performances and the overall logistics costs. In this paper decision support systems (DSS) and tools for the design, management and control of a storage system are illustrated. In particular, the proposed integrated platform is based on a hierarchical top-down design procedure able to face jointly storage management, storage allocation and storage assignment issues. The presented platform implements a systematic procedure based on the adoption and combination of different strategies and rules concerning with the static design, the storage allocation, the storage assignment, etc., in order to suggest the best configuration and settings for a specific real warehouse application