Modelling Analysis of a Four-Way Shuttle-Based Storage and Retrieval System on the Basis of Operation Strategy

Abstract

In the context of sustainable development, this paper rationalises the outbound process of a four-way shuttle system with a focus on their modelling, performance evaluation and configuration using a parallel operation strategy to reduce resource waste, thus achieving sustainable development. The parallelism of the hoist and shuttle is innovatively incorporated into the four-way shuttle system, so the modelling content is divided into parallel and serial types. In the parallel operation strategy model, a separation–aggregation queueing network model is constructed, and the open-loop queueing network is innovatively solved using the maximum entropy method. In the serial operation strategy model, a semi-open-loop queuing network is constructed and solved using the geometric matrix method. By varying different parameters, the accuracy of the model is verified by Arena simulation with an error range of 10% or less, and the error of the system performance index calculation is reduced by 20% compared with the existing methods. Setting up 18 different sizes of shuttle systems provided a better performance than a single serial-operation strategy through the addition of parallel strategies, with an average reduction of 12.6% in the system response time and a minimum reduction of 1.8%. The conclusions of this paper were verified on the basis of an arithmetic case analysis.

Keywords

• automated warehouses
• four-way shuttle systems
• queuing network model
• analytical and numerical modelling
• performance analysis