Decision Support Research in Warehousing and Distribution: A Systematic Literature Review

The increase in e-commerce and omnichannel commerce is having a significant impact on the supply chain sector and its warehouses. Fluctuations in demand and priorities, the requirement for value-added service, government regulations and other factors put pressure on the operational decision makers on the warehouse floor and the systems that support them. The increasing complexity of daily warehouse operations means that decision support systems will need to become more sophisticated and intelligent to assist decision makers in real-time. The aim of this literature review is to investigate how decision support in warehousing and distribution operations is examined in the research literature. The objective of this review is to understand how this decision support research can assist operational decision makers to manage and complete the daily volume of work through the warehouse. Fifty-one articles were obtained by the literature search. Articles were categorized by type of warehouse, decision support target, operational task and problem type, research article methodology, architecture and technology. Decision support is examined in almost all areas of warehousing operations with the use of a variety of methods and technologies within the research literature. Most “daily warehouse operational” decision support deals with expertise transfer and reacting to real-time events. This paper highlights the lack of research into human–machine collaboration in adaptive decision support systems to assist warehouse operational decision makers.