More Shuttles, Less Cost: Energy Efficient Planning for Scalable High-Density Warehouse Environments

Abstract

We propose planning strategies for a shuttle-based warehousing system. Within this system, goods are not only transported by, but also stored on shuttles. This allows the simultaneous motion of all goods without preparation time. We exploit these properties to improve both space- and energy efficiency compared to conventional storage systems while maintaining fast access to all goods. We present a framework to manage the shuttles in a very high density environment, allowing efficient in- and output, storage, and sequencing. The proposed framework is conflict-free, space- and energy efficient and its practical applicability is demonstrated in a simulative analysis based on a real-world problem. In our sample application holding 1950 shuttles we achieve storage densities of approximately 88% while maintaining efficient access to all goods.

Automated Planning and Control for High-Density Parking Lots

“…(de Wilde, ter Mors, and Witteveen 2013) presented the Push and Rotate algorithm to move agents to specific positions through evasive movements of other agents. Similar tasks are found in other application domains, namely goods transfer (Ma et al 2016b), warehouse storage (Huetter 2016), transshipment (Yu and LaValle 2013), container stacking (Salido et al 2009), among many others. (Ma et al 2016a) discussed the challenges arising from the application of multi-agent path finding to real world scenarios.…”

“…The procedure is repeat with updated src and dst pointers until v has reached its destination (line 14). This primitive is similar to the algorithm proposed by (Huetter 2016) but additional path computations to bring vehicle v close to the obstacle ensemble and with additional restrictions on the number of pushes (since the objective is for vehicle v to reach its destination rather than making one cell available). The cost of a push move is solely equal to combined cost of the length of path π(v) plus the movements of blocking vehicles in the obstacle ensemble.…”