【正文】
lanning refers to management decisions that affect the intermediate term (one or multiple months), such as inventory management and storage location assignment. Control refers to the operational decisions that the short term (hours, day), such as routing, sequencing, scheduling and orderbatching. Prior to the literature survey, we give an introduction into warehousing systems and a classification of warehouse management problems. 1. Introduction . The increasingly busy warehouse Gudehus [1] and Graves [2], Hausman [3] and Schwarz [4] introduced the design, planning and control of ware housing systems as new research topics. The operation of warehousing systems has received considerable interest in the literature ever since. It is not surprising that the research on warehousing systems gained interest in the 1970s, since this was the era that management interest shifted from productivity im provement to inventory reduction. The introduction of information systems made this strategy possible, with Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRPII) as a notable example. From Japan a new management philosophy emerged: JustInTime (JIT) production. JIT attempts to achieve highvolume production using minimal inven tories of parts that arrive just in time. These new devel opments demanded from warehouses that low volumes be delivered more frequently with shorter response times from a significantly wider variety of Stock Keeping Units (SKU39。s), namely: *Current address: Berenschot, . Box 8039, 3503 RA Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31302916822, Fax: +31302916826 0740817X 243。39。762 receiving, storage, orderpicking, accumulation and sorting and shipping. An order lists the 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 es