A stochastic approach for the design of an end-of-line storage area

Nowadays, many companies tend to minimize inventories throughout the entire logistic process by adopting a cross-docking policy, i.e. preferring direct shipping rather than to store products. In these systems the objective is to maintain synchronization between production and shipping processes, but storage areas are still necessary in practice to work as buffers able to compensate short period mismatches.The paper proposes a stochastic approach to design such storage areas. In particular, the case in which a good trade-off between the number of storage zones (called bins in the following) and their size is addressed. The simulation is adopted to determine storage requirements from a stochastic point of view, and an analytic formulae is derived to evaluate an approximate coverage probability.