I’m working on a project to change the location of items in a warehouse to allow me to ship items together which were bought in the purchase order (currently impossible due to conveyor logistics). The problem is, I don’t have enough space to relocate them all and don’t know which items to prioritize.
I have a list of orders, each of which has a given benefit associated with it if I can put the items next to each other. One or more distinct items is associated with each of these orders. The goal is to maximize the value of a given number of relocations.
Here’s the situation that I believe makes this problem difficult:
Let’s say I take the item that appears most frequently as a single item in these orders (call it item A) for my first relocation priority. I then repeat that process for item B, so we will have captured opportunity for single item A orders, single item B orders, and item AB orders.
When I try to repeat this process for item C, I will get benefit from A, B, C, AB, AC, and BC orders. However, if AC orders represent an enormous amount of the opportunity, I would have been better served taking item C as my second priority item, so I would need to change the ranking.
This will only get more complex as items and pairs are added to the list. Does anybody know the best way to prioritize my items?
