Robotic mobile fulfilment systems considering customer classes

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 system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71620107002), the National Social Science Foundation of China (16ZDA013), and Erasmus+ [grant number 2019-1-FR01-KA203-063063]. Yeming GONG issupported by Business Intelligence Center of EMLYON.