Design and Performance Analysis of Robot Shuttle System

Improving storage capacity and operational efficiency for material handling system has attracted much research interest, especially in light of the booming development of E-commerce. This paper presents a robot shuttle system (RSS), featured by picking autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) transporting storage bins in batch to material handlers, which has higher storage capacity and operational efficiency. An open queueing network model is developed to describe the RSS and estimate system performance in terms of throughput capacity and order cycle time. Then, we investigate the influence of the number of storage boxes that the robot can carry on the system performance through numerical experiments, and find an appropriate balance between robot and picker operation proficiency.