The Role of Distributed Intelligence in Warehouse Management Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Third-party-logistics warehouses have been gaining popularity in recent years mainly due to their ability to buffer the material flow along a supply chain and consolidate the products from various suppliers, which has a major impact on supply chain efficiency. The issues and challenges in warehouse management are similar in many ways to those faced in manufacturing control, resilience and adaptability being two such issues. Since distributed intelligence (DI) approaches have been extensively studied to address such issues in manufacturing control, this paper examines the possible adoption of DI approaches in warehouse management systems (WMS). Further, the paper discusses the challenges in warehouse management and compares these challenges with the characteristics of manufacturing problems that DI approach is suited to.

Validating Time Efficiency of AOSR 2.0: A Novel WMS Planner Algorithm for SMEs, under Industry 4.0

“…1; all of the transactions, performed on an Intel (R) Core (TM) i5 computer, having 3.7 GHz clock rate and 64-bit Mac Operating System (OS), took less than 0.02s, which reflects its efficiency with respect to time as well. This execution time is comparable with the other standard approaches validated and tested by Waris et al [18], on a similar hardware configuration (Intel Core i5 with 64-bit OS), where the average execution time for parsing information, in a similar scenario, is 0.021s (This article does not include explicit test cases for validating the execution time for other existing approaches). A closer look at Fig.…”

“…SKUs, quantity and products classes, from several different industrial sectors e.g., electronics industry, medical industry, textile firms, paint and glass industry. The 6-Feature Strategy of AOSR [6] attempts to provide a solution to SMEs' problems in warehousing, such as wandering items/picking lists [14], [15], inaccurate stock value at runtime [16], unmanaged receiving and expedition areas [17], unmanaged storage capacity [18] and inappropriate retrieval scheduling [19].…”

Product Intelligence in Warehouse Management: A Case Study

“…Although there are numerous examples in the literature of deployments that use multi-agent approaches in warehouse management systems [15][16][17], the application of the product intelligence paradigm in warehouse management systems (WMS) and the benefits in the operations they manage is yet to be studied. However, the potential of a distributed intelligence approach, such as a product intelligence one, in WMSs cannot be underestimated due to reasons that might cause centralised management systems not to perform in a efficient way [18]:…”