Research On Warehouse Layout Optimization Based On Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Automated Storage and Retrieval System has a very wide foreground in goods storage because of its small acreage occupied and convenient operation. It is very important for the enterprise to do the warehouse optimization layout under the changeful logistics environment. The research on warehouse optimization layout is a basic academic project, which is aimed at the furious commercial competition of domestic and oversea automatic storage system.Warehouse Layout Problem is a complicated non-linearity constrained problem. It belongs to NP-hard problem. Usually, a certain heuristic algorithm may be used to get a feasible result. But, as far as our problem are concerned, The traditional heuristic algorithm, such as Simulated Annealing Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, Taboo Search Algorithms, are difficult to reach the Global Optimum Results and the quality of the results also is not very good. Since 1990s, some scientists put forward a new heuristic algorithm, which is called Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm(ACOA). Although the research to ACOA is limited, numerous researches have indicated that, ACOA has a strong ability to find the Global Optimum Results. So, this paper intents to use the ACOA to solve the Warehouse Layout Problem.This paper proposed one class of warehouse layout problem: Books Warehouse Layout Problem. A mathematical programming model was given for the problem. Two different Ant Colony Optimization heuristics based separately on Bin-packing Problem structure and Generalized Assignment Problem structure were designed for Books Warehouse Layout Problem. The computational test illustrated that compared with above heuristic algorithms (SA, GA, TS), ACOA has a great improvement in the precision and efficiency of the Global Optimum Results. So, ACOA is an effective algorithm to solve the Warehouse Layout Problem.