Concept development and evaluation of order assignment strategies in a highly-dynamic, hybrid pallet storage and retrieval system

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and evaluate various order assignment strategies for a new, highly-dynamic hybrid pallet storage and retrieval system or dynamic hybrid pallet warehouse (DHPW). The research gap we fill is the identification of the order assignment strategies, which guarantees the highest performance for this new warehouse system in different operational conditions. First, we present a brief description of the system under consideration. We then go on to present a brief literature review on order assignment strategies for stacker-crane-based AS/RSs and AVS/RSs. Next, we develop our concept of order assignment strategies for a DHPW with sequenced retrieval and storage, followed by a discrete event simulation and an evaluation of the concepts according to the level of performance they enable. Finally, we identify the operations of the process whose order assignment strategy has the greatest impact on performance, and suggest an optimum combination of order assignment strategies.