Balancing Temperature and Humidity Control in Storage Location Assignment: An Optimization Perspective in Refrigerated Warehouses

Carlo Maria Aloe and Annarita De Maio ()
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Carlo Maria Aloe: Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy
Annarita De Maio: Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance “G. Anania”, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 16, 1-23

Abstract: As consumer awareness grows and regulations regarding the quality and safety of perishable goods become stricter, careful management of environmental conditions throughout the supply chain is becoming essential. Among these factors, storage temperature plays a crucial role in preserving the physicochemical characteristics of products. Therefore, an effective approach to ensure quality and safety up to the final customer is to continuously monitor the temperature within warehouses, using specific location-mapping techniques and stocking optimization methods. This study proposes a dynamic optimization model for the storage location assignment problem, integrating both temperature and humidity constraints into the placement of stock-keeping units. The model operates under a multi-period, multi-product framework and leverages real-time sensor data to account for spatial temperature stratification and environmental variability within the warehouse, contributing to the reduction in the energy consumption. Two alternative optimization strategies are explored: one focused on minimizing thermal and humidity stress, and another targeting the reduction in average storage cycle time. A detailed what-if analysis is conducted across three scenarios, varying warehouse fill rates and incoming load volumes, in order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed model in a real-data context. The results show that the approach minimizing environmental stress consistently outperforms traditional methods in quality-related metrics, maintaining superior objective function values.

Keywords: cold warehousing; storage assignment; optimization; temperature control; humidity control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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