Route planning methods for a modular warehouse system

Abstract

In this study, procedures are presented that can be used to determine the routes of the packages transported within a modular storage system. The problem is a variant of robot motion planning problem.  The structures of the procedures are developed in three steps for the simultaneous movement of multiple unit-sized packages in a modular warehouse.  The proposed heuristic methods consist of route planning, tagging, and main control components. In order to demonstrate the solution performance of the methods, various experiments were conducted with different data sets and the solution times and qualities of the proposed methods were compared with previous studies. It was found that the proposed methods provide better solutions when taking the number of steps and solution time into consideration.