A Four-Way Shuttle Scheduling Method Based on Grey Wolf Algorithm

Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) are essential to the logistics system. The cost of this transportation can be reduced by improving the operation efficiency of AS/RS and decreasing the time required for in and out of warehouse orders. However, a bottleneck exists in the automated warehouse’s transportation capability and the sizeable occupied area. Therefore, the four-way shuttle-based storage system with stacker and four-way shuttle cars as a scheduling tool can increase the land utilization rate and reduce the time of input and output tasks. Meanwhile, the improved grey wolf optimizer and greedy algorithm are used to optimize the process of determining the location-allocation and delivery vehicle scheduling. The simulation shows that the optimization algorithm increases the shelf utilization rate and reduces time consumption by 28% and 17% respectively contrasting initial results. The advantages of an optimization algorithm can be fully reflected compared with the results of random scheduling.