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they demand an increased productivity. On the other hand, the rapidly changing market imposes financial risks upon the introduction of capital intensive highperformance warehousing equipment which may be di?cult to reconfigure or discard. Hence, there is a great need for sophisticated techniques that provide a dependable basis for adequate planning and control of warehouses in such plex this paper we present a survey of methods and models that have appeared in the literature for the planning and control of warehousing systems. In the remainder of Section 1, we discuss warehousing systems and warehouse management. In Sections 2 and 3 we discuss the literature on planning and control issues, respectively. Finally, in Section 4 we end with conclusions and suggestions for future research. . Warehousing Warehousing involves all movement of goods within warehouses and Distribution Centers (DC39。s), namely: *Current address: Berenschot, . Box 8039, 3503 RA Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31302916822, Fax: +31302916826 0740817X 243。 1999 ``IIE39。39。 IIE Transactions (1999) 31, 751177。762 receiving, storage, orderpicking, accumulation and sorting and shipping. An order lists the SKU39。s and quantities requested by a customer or by a production unit, in a DC or a production warehouse, is the process of gathering SKU39。s that have been requested in an order at one an orderpicking operation, the order pickers may pick one order at the time (single orderpicking). A higher e?ciency may be achieved by picking multiple orders simultaneously (batch picking). Furthermore, orders may be picked from separate warehousing systems or separate zones within systems. Consequently, in such situations the orders need to be sorted and accumulated to establish order integrity. Orders may be sorted during the orderpicking process (sortwhilepick) or afterwards (pickandsort). Warehousing systems may be classi?ed into three groups: (1) Pickertoproduct systems. (2) Producttopicker systems. (3) Pickerless systems. In a pickertoproduct system, manual orderpickers ride in vehicles along the pick positions. There is a wide variety of vehicles available from manually propelled vehicles to motorized vehicles which also enable vertical movement for orderpicking from elevated positions. Instead of a vehicle, a system may also include a takeaway conveyor for picked products (picktobelt).Examples of producttopicker systems are the Auto mated Storage/Retrieval System (AS/RS) and the AS/RS is a highbay warehouse with Storage/Retrieval (S/R) machines or automated stacker cranes that perform the storage and retrieval of storage modules (such as pallets or containers). A miniload AS/RS is an AS/RS especially equipped for the storage and orderpicking of small items. A carousel consists of storage positions that rotate around a closed loop thereby delivering the requested SKU39。s to the orderpicker. Carousels may rotate horizontally (horizontal carousel) or vertically (vertical carousel).Pickerless systems make use of robottechnology or automatic respect to