Aisle Configurations for Unit-Load Warehouses

Unit-load warehouses are used to store items—typically pallets—that can be stowed or retrieved in a single trip. In the traditional, ubiquitous design, storage racks are arranged to create parallel picking aisles, which force workers to travel rectilinear distances to picking locations. We consider the problem of arranging aisles in new ways to reduce the cost of travel within these warehouses. Our models produce alternative designs with piecewise diagonal cross aisles, and with picking aisles that are not parallel. One of the designs promises to reduce distances that workers travel by more than 20 percent for warehouses of reasonable size. We also develop a theoretical bound that shows that this design is close to optimal. Please do not cite or distribute this paper without permission of the authors.