Robotic mobile fulfilment systems considering customer classes

Yeming Gong (), Mingzhou Jin and Zhe Yuan
Additional contact information
Yeming Gong: EM - EMLyon Business School
Mingzhou Jin: The University of Tennessee [Knoxville]
Zhe Yuan: EMLV - École de management Léonard de Vinci

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper studies a Robotic Mobile Fulfilment System (RMFS), featured by a number of robots lifting and transporting movables storage shelves from storage grids to order pickers. In such systems, online retailers often classify their customers by two major classes ‘expedited shipping' and ‘standard shipping'. We build high-dimension Markov models to describe this system with customer classes, calculate the throughput of this system given the number of robots and provide design rules to determine the optimal number of robots and their capacities considering the trade-off between capacities of picker stations and robots. We verify the analytic results of Markov models with simulations. We further consider multiple-picker RMFS and study its optimal design.

Keywords: warehouse management; facility planning and design; order picking; Supply Chain Delivery; robotic mobile fulfilment systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-18
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2021, 59 (16), 5032-5049 p. ⟨10.1080/00207543.2020.1779370⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-03188177

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2020.1779370

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().