Industry partner: Dematic Ltd.
Funding agency: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
Project description:
Pallet building is one of the warehousing industry's core functions. Pallets are the standard form of delivery from warehouses to retail stores. Building good pallets that respect transportation requirements such as stability, as well as retail preferences such as item family groupings is a goal of all warehouse management systems. Mixed-case pallet optimization was the subject of an NSERC Engage application between Dematic Limited and professor Samir Elhedhli and professor Fatma Gzara from Waterloo's Optimization Lab (WatOpt). The research conducted under the Engage project focused on two objectives: developing an understanding of the major challenges of pallet building; surveying the literature on available solution methodologies; and performing a comparative study of the most promising methodologies. The current project builds on the research findings in the Engage project. The goal of this research project is to develop models, solution methodologies, and data-driven optimization approaches for the 3D bin packing problem and the mixed-case pallet optimization problem. While the problems are easy to state, their optimization is extremely challenging. We aim to propose, implement, and test a set of sophisticated solution approaches to solve the mixed case pallet optimization problem while incorporating several design requirements such as family groups, order preferences, fragility restrictions, and speed of solution.