Hafi—Highest Autocorrelated First: A new priority rule to control autocorrelated input processes at merges

Many intralogistics systems expose autocorrelated arrival processes with significant influence on the systems' performance. Unfortunately there are no control strategies available which take this into account. Instead standard strategies like First Come First Served are applied which lead to systems tending to exhibit long queues and high volatility, even though these strategies perform well in the case of uncorrelated processes. So, there is a strong need for control strategies managing autocorrelated arrival processes. Accordingly this paper introduces HAFI (Highest Autocorrelated First), a new strategy which determines the processes' priority in accordance to their autocorrelation. The paper focuses on controlling autocorrelated arrival processes at a merge. The strategies First Come First Served and Longest Queue First will serve as reference. As a result and in respect to properly designed facilities, HAFI leads to comparatively short queues and waiting times as well as balanced 95th percentile values of the queue lengths of autocorrelated input processes.