ON SHUFFLING OPERATIONS BEFORE THE STORAGE OF PRODUCTION BATCHES: AN ALGORITHM FOR CERAMIC TILE MANUFACTURERS

For ceramic tile manufacturers, warehouse management represents an extremely critical issue due to the necessity of storing pallets in an open yard by stacking them according to specific storage rules. In particular, pallets belonging to the same production batch must be stored in adjacent bins because customer orders must be collected from the same batch. Hence, a high fragmentation of the yard must be avoided. In order to free the bins that are to be assigned to the batches, shuffling operations must be performed before the batches are delivered by the production lines. In this paper, a shuffling algorithm is presented with the aim of designing a useful and flexible tool that may be integrated into a Warehouse Management System.