Improvement of automated storage and retrieval systems class-based storage policy by common zone allocation

It has been concluded that the performance of class-based storage policy is better than the performance of random storage policy in the literature. However, the rack shortage problem assigned to the 1st class items makes it hard to apply the class-based storage policy in practice. In this paper, a new common zone concept is introduced between two classes to resolve the problem with class-based storage policy. The common zone is the area to accept items from both classes. An AS/RS model is developed for computer simulation study and the effect of common area sizes with various AS/RS operation conditions is analyzed.