Operations management of multiple machine automatic warehousing systems

Most operations management studies of automatic warehousing systems investigate single-machine systems in isolation of the total system which includes other related functions. In this paper, we overcome these limitations and investigate an integrative model of a warehouse, containing several storage/retrieval (S/R) machines, which is integrated within a total system. Moreover, whereas performance was previously analyzed, mostly, in terms of throughput and travel times of the S/R machines, this paper considers additional performance measures such as response times, queue lengths, and utilization of the S/R machines. A simulation of the integrative model is used to study the effects of various operations management tactics on performance. The results demonstrate that economic gains are possible while hardly sacrificing performance. The gains result from decreasing the number of S/R machines – up to 20%, and reducing building space as a consequence of shorter queues.