Picking Station Location in Traditional and Flying-V Aisle Warehouses for Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System

Abstract

This paper studies the optimal location of picking stations for robotic mobile fulfillment system, which is a parts-to-picker storage system with robots lifting pods directly to stationary pickers. While few previous researches focus on picking station location problem, we develop an integer programming model to determine the optimal location of picking stations to minimize the total traveling distance of robots. In addition, we compare the performance of both traditional layout and flying-V layout under random storage assignment policy. A series of numerical experiments are conducted, and the results show that flying-V designs can obtain 8-18% distance saving comparing to traditional designs. Besides, with each additional picking station, the marginal advantage of distance saving is gradually decreasing and the average saving is about 10%. These achievements can offer valuable insights to warehouse designers in practice.