Abstract: Location allocation and goods picking are two important aspects of warehouse management. A reasonable location allocation strategy can effectively improve the efficiency of goods picking and save storage costs. The commonly used ABC location allocation strategy classifies goods by category and turnover rate. However, when the demand is uncertain and considering the need of safety stock, the picking of a small part of goods in the replenishment cycle of a single kind of goods is a small probability event. The ABC location allocation strategy will make the goods with high total turnover frequency also occupy the location close to the I/O point, and its turnover frequency is low, resulting in the increase of the total picking distance. Therefore, a location allocation strategy based on uncertain demand is proposed. By considering the different demand probabilities of different quantities of single goods, the strategy divides the same goods into different zones according to the demand probability, and separates and stores the same goods in different zones. The small probability demand part of various goods will be stored in the location far away from the I/O point, so as to improve the total demand probability of the location close to the I/O point, so as to make the storage and picking process more efficient. Firstly, taking the average one-way picking distance as the optimization objective, the expressions of total turnover rate and distance considering demand uncertainty are derived. Secondly, the simultaneous interpreting algorithm is compared with the traditional ABC location allocation strategy. Experiments show that the storage strategy based on demand probability partition allocation is better than the traditional ABC location allocation strategy to varying degrees under different demand curves, standard deviations and service levels; Under the ABC slope curve of 20% goods contributing 80% demand, in different probability zoning strategies, when the cumulative demand probability of goods in the first partition (the area closest to the I/O point) is about 20%, the total picking distance is relatively shortest.

Key words: storage allocation, demand uncertainty, partition picking, storage strategy