274 Int. J. Advanced Operations Management, Vol. 2, Nos. 3/4, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A review of methodologies for class-based storage location assignment in a warehouse Gajendra Kumar Adil* and Venkata Reddy Muppani Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India Fax: +91-22-2572-2872 E-mail: adil@iitb.ac.in E-mail: muppani@iitb.ac.in *Corresponding author Alakanada Bandyopadhyay Department of Computer Science, Alabama A&M University, Normal, Alabama 35762, USA E-mail: alak.bando@aamu.edu Abstract: The class-based storage distributes the products among a number of classes and reserves a region for each class within the storage area. This paper discusses three important issues in class-based storage location assignment: reduction in storage space requirements under class-based policy compared to dedicated policy, cube-per-order index (COI) and general orderings of products in storage class formation and combined inventory staggering and class-based storage assignment. Accordingly, class-based storage assignment problems are classified and methodologies for class-based storage assignment available in the literature are reviewed. The paper concludes by suggesting some future research in the area of class-based storage assignment. Keywords: methodologies for class-based storage assignment; warehouse design; storage assignment. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Adil, G.K., Muppani, V.R. and Bandyopadhyay, A. (2010) ‘A review of methodologies for class-based storage location assignment in a warehouse’, Int. J. Advanced Operations Management, Vol. 2, Nos. 3/4, pp.274–291. Biographical notes: Gajendra Kumar Adil is a Professor at the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. He received his PhD in IE from the University of Manitoba in 1994, his MSc in IE from the University of Regina in 1990, his MTech in MechE from IIT-Kanpur in 1987 and his BE in MechE from National Institute of Technology, Raipur in 1985. His prior professional assignments have been with Bilkent University in Turkey, City University of Hong Kong, i2 Technologies (Dallas, USA) and Bristol Aerospace Ltd. (Winnipeg, Canada). His publications have appeared in leading journals such as Operations Research, IIE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, International Transactions in Operational Research,