To achieve effective use of floor space and equipment, the location of stock must be determined to minimize material handling cost. This thesis deals with the item assignment problem of a warehouse with multiple input points and single output point. Also, the number of storage frequences is not necessary the same as that of retrieval for each item. A mathematical model is developed with the objective of minimizing the total travel distance associated with storage and retrieval operations. We also develop several heuristics based on the retrieval order frequency, retrieval/storage frequency ratio of items, and ABC curve.
It is observed that the ABC curve based heuristic gives the best solution which is near optimal. Based on the test results from real world data, the ABC curve based heuristic is found to give a best performance.
