A Building-Block-Based Genetic Algorithm for Solving the Robots Allocation Problem in a Robotic Mobile Fulfilment System

Jingtian Zhang, Fuxing Yang and Xun Weng

Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2019, vol. 2019, 1-15

Abstract:

Robotic mobile fulfilment system (RMFS) is an efficient and flexible order picking system where robots ship the movable shelves with items to the picking stations. This innovative parts-to-picker system, known as Kiva system, is especially suited for e-commerce fulfilment centres and has been widely used in practice. However, there are lots of resource allocation problems in RMFS. The robots allocation problem of deciding which robot will be allocated to a delivery task has a significant impact on the productivity of the whole system. We model this problem as a resource-constrained project scheduling problem with transfer times (RCPSPTT) based on the accurate analysis of driving and delivering behaviour of robots. A dedicated serial schedule generation scheme and a genetic algorithm using building-blocks-based crossover (BBX) operator are proposed to solve this problem. The designed algorithm can be combined into a dynamic scheduling structure or used as the basis of calculation for other allocation problems. Experiment instances are generated based on the characteristics of RMFS, and the computation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional rule-based scheduling method. The BBX operator is rapid and efficient which performs better than several classic and competitive crossover operators.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2019/6153848.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2019/6153848.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlmpe:6153848

DOI: 10.1155/2019/6153848

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Mathematical Problems in Engineering from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().