Developing Spreadsheet Based Decision Support System to Solve Warehouse Layout Problem

A plant layout study is to analyze different physical configurations for an industrial plant. The warehouse layout problem involves allocating several different product types to certain areas of warehouse so that the cost of material handling from docks of the warehouse can be minimized. The layout of a warehouse may need to be change to accommodate new product lines or to add greater flexibility to the warehouse operations. To ensure the success of the project, a detailed planning process should be followed. Regarding to above Decision Support Systems (DSS) are developed to help company’s personnel, modify the configuration of warehouse layout. In this paper, discrete integer programming for modeling the layout problem has been linked to Visual Basic programming in Excel to develop an spreadsheet based decision support system (DSS) in which , the user specifies the area of the warehouse in number of bays, places the docks around the warehouse and gives the frequency of their usage, and provides the demand and area required per product type. Then the problem will be solved to find the proper location of each product type for minimum material handling cost.