Problem Graph for Warehousing Design

Warehousing plays a key role in supply chain performance (reactivity, flexibility, quality). In order to be competitive, reorganization of the warehouse is often required. The reorganization generally occurs via a design process based on two main stages. First, the designers have to precisely identify the design problems. Second, they have to design solutions to solve the problems. Academic researchers in warehousing design are used to studying all the different operations (receiving, storage, order picking, shipping) one by one while the warehouse design problems are linked together. As far as we know, the literature does not propose any model that capitalizes and links all the operations-related problems and solutions needed for warehouse designing. In this chapter, we propose a reference model as a graph including both the problems and the solutions advocated by a French third-party logistics (3PL) provider and quoted in the literature. The creation of such a model has been suggested in the state of the art in the literature. This model has been designed using a semantic and a syntax inspired by the TRIZ problem graph and with a taxonomy standardizing the vocabulary. The problem-solution graph is made up of 31 problems assessed by 31 evaluation parameters and 49 solutions defined by 73 action parameters. An industrial case study, in a French 3PL warehouse of 35,000 m2 and 45,805 locations, proves the value of such a graph.