SIMULATION-BASED DESIGN EVALUATION OF UNIT LOAD AUTOMATED STORAGE-RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

The focus of this paper is unit load automated storage/retrieval (AS/R ) systems. Two of the more important factors affecting the design of A S/R systems are system configuration and policies used for storing and retrieving items to and from the warehouse. Simulation results are ob tained for six different single-dock layouts using three different sch eduling policies. The results are compared using system throughput as the primary criterion; other performance measures investigated are sto rage and retrieval waiting times, and rejects due to the rack or input /output queues being fully utilized.