Mixed-load transportation scheduling in a floor warehouse environment

In a warehouse, efficient product transportation is required for high productivity. In general, it is recognized that mixed-load transportation can decrease the moving time to some extent. However, many scheduling methods without regard to mixed-load transportation have recently been proposed. In this respect, we propose a design for scheduling problems with mixed-load transportation handled by vehicles. The proposed method uses two well-known dispatching rules and a local search method based on a simulated annealing algorithm. Two rules are applied to obtain the initial solution while ignoring the mixed-load transportation, and the local search method is applied to improve the initial solution to obtain a semi-optimal solution in consideration of mixed-load transportation. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed system, we implemented our system with several product transportation environment. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.