Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Volume 59, Issue 3, Pages 772-797Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2019.1708990
Keywords
backroom layout problem; grocery retail; strategic planning; mixed integer programming
Categories
Funding
- North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement
- European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) [NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020]
- ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme
- National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia [POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029609]
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This paper presents a mathematical optimization approach to design backroom layout in grocery retail, where the average walking distances are reduced by 30% through comparisons between real layouts and proposed model layouts. The findings suggest that designers currently neglect the different replenishment frequencies of storage departments.
The backroom of retail stores has structural differences when compared with other warehouses and distribution centres, which are more traditionally studied in the literature. This paper presents a mathematical optimisation approach for an unequal area facility layout problem, applied in designing the backroom layout in grocery retail. A set of rectangular facilities (backroom departments) with given area requirements has to be placed, without overlapping, on a limited floor space (backroom area), which can have a regular or an irregular shape. The objective is to find the location and format of the storage departments, such that the walking distances in the store by store employees are minimised. The proposed approach is tested in a European grocery retailer. In the computational experiments, several real store layouts are compared with the ones suggested by the proposed model. The decrease in the walking distances is, on average, 30 percent. In order to understand what the current designers' strategy is, a set of scenarios was created and compared with the real layouts. Each scenario ignores a characteristic of the problem. The goal is to understand what aspect designers are currently discarding. The findings indicate that, currently, designers neglect the different replenishment frequencies of storage departments.
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