Mixed-Load Transportation Scheduling of Multiple Agents in a Warehouse Environment

摘要

In a floor warehouse environment, where many agents transport numbers of products iteratively, efficient product transportation is required for high productivity. In general, the following facts are recognized. (i) Three kinds of jobs exist: picking, replenishment and arrangement. (ii) Mixed-load transportation can decrease the completion time of vehicles. In many former methods, however, the above facts are not considered. We propose a design methodology using a dispatching rule and a local search method based on a simulated annealing algorithm. The rule is applied to obtain the initial solution and the local search method is adopted to obtain a semi-optimal solution in consideration of mixed-load transportation. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed algorithm, we have implemented the algorithm in several product environments. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.