Jarvis and McDowell (1991) developed the necessary and sufficient
conditions for optimally allocating items in a class of symmetric
warehouses. Simply assigning themost frequently pickeditems to the
nearest aisles will not necessarily minimize the average travel distance
if the aisles are not symmetrical. Frazelle and Sharp (1989)
showed that the storage assignment problemis in the class ofNP-hard
problemsforwhich theoptimal solutionis computationally infeasible
to obtain in problems of practical sizes, and thus proposed a heuristic
procedure based on the demand dependency between items