Multi-objective warehouse building design to optimize the cycle time, total cost, and carbon footprint

Warehouse building design tackles the industrial issue of best studying the overall configuration and dimensions of the storage systems reaching one or more predefined target of performance. This paper proposes a multi-objective model for the warehouse building design to minimize the cycle time, the total cost, and the carbon footprint of the storage system over its lifetime. The goal is to define the overall building dimensions, addressing the target storage capacity and the handling performances, balancing the aforementioned three objective functions. The cycle time computes the average duration of the pickup and drop-off activities, while the system total cost and carbon footprint rise over the entire warehouse lifetime, including the installation and operating phases. The developed model is applied to design the warehouse for an Italian food and beverage company. Results highlight that the total cost and the carbon footprint functions lead to similar warehouse configurations distinguished by a compact vertical structure. On the contrary, the cycle time function takes advantage of a flatter and wider building even if a dramatic increase of the environmental (+40%) and cost (+10%) objective functions occurs. The proposed best balance solution limits the total cost and carbon footprint increment below 1% compared to their single-objective optima, while the cycle time worsening is limited to 4% compared to the optimal cycle time solution.