Solving Warehouse Layout Problem With Metaheuristics Emerging pressures caused by the rapid development of technology and increase of competition, are perceived by all companies in the supply chain. Due to the rapid changes of customer demands along with these pressures, logistics operations within the supply chain need to be integrally performed. In this context, warehouses are one of the important elements that need to be focused on. Warehouses, taking the role of bridge between customers and suppliers, can only perform their duties accordingly their purposes, if only they organized well. At this point, warehouse layout becomes an important issue.
In this study, a warehouse layout problem model for pallets with variable height is developed. Due to the NP-hard nature of the developed model, one of the metaheuristics methods particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used. Two new boundary conditions are proposed in addition to the current boundary conditions developed for PSO algorithms. Besides, a new assignment algorithm for particles’ initial minimum values is proposed which provides the particles increase the probability of finding the most appropriate and best results by narrowing the solution space. The PSO algorithm with proposed algorithm and standard PSO algorithm are applied on different problems, and the obtained results are compared. At the end of comparison, results obtained from the methods that give the best solutions in terms of warehouse rack configuration and warehouse layout dimensions are presented.
