Optimal Management of Shuttle Robots in a High-Rise Warehouse Using Timed Automata Models

摘要

In warehousing systems, the speed of the removal and distribution of goods often represents a bottleneck as it limits the achievable throughput and, thus, the efficiency of the complete warehousing system. Consequently, an optimal management of the distribution of goods can lead to large efficiency and financial gains. In this contribution, it is shown for an accurate model of an industrial real-world high-rise warehouse (HRW), which is connected to a polymer production plant, that rigorous optimization of the distribution procedure can lead to a large efficiency increase in comparison to standard techniques. To this end, the distribution problem is modelled using timed automata (TA) in which the jobs arrive one after the other and are not known in advance. The TA-based approach, which was originally developed for standard scheduling problems, is extended to a reactive moving window approach that employs a cost-optimal reachability algorithm to compute optimal plans for the goods distribution. We show that compared to a typical first-come first-served dispatching rule, this approach can lead to throughput gains of more than 40%.