Design of warehousing and distribution systems: an object model of facilities, functions and information

Design of warehousing and distribution systems is more an art than a science that reflects the cultures of particular design teams. Warehouses are often designed and operated by third party logistics companies with tight margins. Therefore, there is increased pressure to design warehouses that are flexible and adaptable, even while the available information is incomplete. Also, designers lack coherent, and explicit, models of information and function flow. The primary goal of the research discussed here is to lay the foundation for developing such models. Working closely with expert designers, we have identified the key pieces of information and organized them in the form of an object model. Using this model, it should eventually be possible to provide relevant information to designers via context-sensitive (or ‘ecological’ or ‘intelligent’) displays. Upon further development, the model will be incorporated into an interactive system to assist in design. In this paper, we describe the object model, and outline plans for implementing a design system.