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Congestion-Aware Warehouse Flow Analysis and Optimization

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Advances in Visual Computing (ISVC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 9475))

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Abstract

Generating realistic configurations of urban models is a vital part of the modeling process, especially if these models are used for evaluation and analysis. In this work, we address the problem of assigning objects to their storage locations inside a warehouse which has a great impact on the quality of operations within a warehouse. Existing storage policies aim to improve the efficiency by minimizing travel time or by classifying the items based on some features. We go beyond existing methods as we analyze warehouse layout network in an attempt to understand the factors that affect traffic within the warehouse. We use simulated annealing based sampling to assign items to their storage locations while reducing traffic congestion and enhancing the speed of order picking processes. The proposed method enables a range of applications including efficient storage assignment, warehouse reliability evaluation and traffic congestion estimation.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and Dong-Ming Yan for his valuable assistance in preparing the simulation framework. This work was partly supported by an Anita Borg Google PhD scholarship award.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology - KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

    Sawsan AlHalawani & Niloy J. Mitra

  2. University College London - UCL, London, UK

    Niloy J. Mitra

Authors
  1. Sawsan AlHalawani
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  2. Niloy J. Mitra
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sawsan AlHalawani .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA

    Ioannis Pavlidis

  6. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

    Rogerio Feris

  7. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Tim McGraw

  8. Side Effects Software, Santa Monica, California, USA

    Mark Elendt

  9. The DiVE, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Regis Kopper

  10. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Eric Ragan

  11. Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

    Zhao Ye

  12. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Gunther Weber

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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AlHalawani, S., Mitra, N.J. (2015). Congestion-Aware Warehouse Flow Analysis and Optimization. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27863-6_66

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27863-6_66

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27862-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27863-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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