Performance Evaluation of an innovative transport system for automated warehouses

In the current digital era, the supply chain industry is undergoing a remarkable change, from the use of autonomous robots in warehouses, to the use of drones in the near future for order fulfillment. Anyway, it still struggles to meet the evolving customer expectations. In fact, nowadays, both customers and businesses demand rapid delivery at no extra cost, which is a growing pressure put on the logistic industry. This is where the intralogistics should make a greater modification on automated storage and retrieval systems to retrieve maximum productivity and meet customer expectation up to the mark. Currently, one of the highly successful types of warehousing systems are the shuttle-based storage and retrieval systems. Even if they perform extremely well compared to traditional warehouses, there are limitations that need to be addressed. With the aim of taking the logistic industry to the next level, the work tests the performance of an innovative design of shuttle-based storage, based on an intelligent disposal of items in the warehouse, according to the association rules extracted from the historical order data. The work evaluates the new system performances by using discrete event simulation tools and compares it with the traditional shuttle based automated storage and retrieval systems.