Multi agent simulation for decision making in warehouse management

The paper presents an agent-based simulation as a tool for decision making about automatic warehouses management. The proposed multi-agent system is going to be used in a real environment within a project developed with a company working on logistics. More in details, we have developed a simulation framework in order to study problems, constraints and performance issues of the truck unload operations. We aim to optimize the suitable number of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) used for unloading containers arrived to the warehouse. This is a critical issue since an AGV is a costly resource and an augment in number does not necessarily correspond to an improved unloading speed. The experiment performed with our simulated environment allows us also to evaluate the impact of other elements to the performance.