Research Article Multicriteria Decision Model to Support the Assignment of Storage Location of Products in a Warehouse Denilson Dimas da Silva, Natália Veloso Caldas de Vasconcelos, and Cristiano Alexandre Virginio Cavalcante Department of Production Engineering, School of Engineering, Centre for Technology and Geosciences, Federal University of Pernambuco, 50670-901 Recife, PE, Brazil Correspondence should be addressed to Nat´ alia Veloso Caldas de Vasconcelos; nataliaveloso@hotmail.com Received 23 November 2014; Revised 17 March 2015; Accepted 17 March 2015 Academic Editor: Bo Yu Copyright © 2015 Denilson Dimas da Silva et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. he storage of products has a strategic role in the supply chain: an eicient organization of products in appropriate locations enables these products to be moved faster inside the warehouse and logistics channel, which increases the speed of delivery and the competitiveness of enterprises. he aim of this paper is to propose a multicriteria decision support model for ranking products and assigning them to warehouse storage locations. During the structuring of the model, the nature of the problem was deined as multicriteria; therefore, the SMARTER and lexicographic methods were applied. he results showed an ordering of products that allowed their strategic location in a hypothetical nonautomated warehouse. 1. Introduction Proper integration of supply chain is one of the major issues in market’s competitiveness [1]. his context highlights the importance of warehouse ac- tivity, which has received considerable interest in the liter- ature on supply chain management. Warehouse activity is an element of fundamental importance in the integration of the logistics channel, and it is regarded as an extension of production. he warehouse system function is composed of a set of related activities, namely, receiving, storage/warehousing, order picking (separation of requests), and expedition [2]. his paper addresses the issue of warehouse storage, which one of the main of warehouses and involves guarding products in certain areas of deposit. It aims to achieve an eicient use of space that facilitates the separation of appli- cations and minimizes the cost of order picking [3]. Diferent criteria, such as size, weight, volume, demand, popularity, cost, and distance, among others, may be used to sort and allocate products to their warehouse positions. When considering all of these criteria simultaneously, select- ing the best place to locate products becomes a diicult activity; thus, the ranking and assignment of products to warehouse locations can be understood as a problem of multicriteria decision-making. In this context, this paper proposes a multicriteria deci- sion model to support the process of assigning storage locations to products in a warehouse. he approach con- sists of the combined use of two multicriteria methods in a decision-making framework. he procedure of storage location assignment is divided into some steps, as can be seen in Figure 1. First, the best places in the warehouse are identiied; then, nondominated products are ranked based on the multicriteria method SMARTER. he assignment of these products is based on their ranking and on the storage capacity of the diferent places. Finally, dominated products are assigned based on the lexicographic method. An improvement of the efectiveness in warehouse activities related to storage location assignment is expected. his paper is organized into four sections besides the introduction. he second section described the Storage Location Assignment Problem (SLAP) while, in the third section, a framework to incorporate multicriteria methods is developed. he multicriteria decision support model, which focuses on deining the priority to be given to allocate a product in the warehouse, is divided into three phases: identi- ication and structuring; application; selection and allocation. Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2015, Article ID 481950, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/481950