Storage assignment in the steel manufacturing industry : mathematical modeling and a priority-based heuristic approach

This paper presents a multi-criteria storage assignment model for the manufacturing system of the steel industry. The manufacturing system involves several plants, dozen of the production line, and thousands of different products. The products have to be routed and stored in various stages till it is dispatched to the end customer. Due to the size and weight of produced items, material handling is a costly operation. The handling cost is related to the number of handling, product storage time, and meeting the due date. This paper presents several storage assignment algorithms to reduce material handling costs. We have tested our algorithms with the data provided by a large steel company in Europe. The results indicate that considering product features in the storage assignment offers better performance on handling, storage time, and meeting the due date.