Coordinated Control of Multi-Zone Avs/Rs, Conveyors And Pick-Up Operations In Warehouse System

During recent years, Autonomous Vehicle Storage and Retrieval Systems (AVS/RS) have been widely applied to meet the increasing demand for rapid and flexible large-scale storage and retrieval tasks. This paper focuses on the control strategies for coordinating the subsystem operations with regard to the conveyor system, rack storage system and pick-up system in order to maximize the system’s throughput capacity and minimize the storage/retrieval times of items in an e-commerce picking warehouse. The study is based on a large-scale shoe manufacturer’s warehouse with an eight-zone AVS/RS. We describe a simulation model that was built to validate the proposed control strategies and thus provides insights for system management.