Performance of carousel systems with ‘organ pipe’ storage

It is well known that, for carousel systems, a dedicated storage, referred to as the ‘organ pipe’ storage in the literature, is optimal with respect to the expected travel distance for processing successive requests. What remains unanswered is how to determine its performance, which is the motivation of this study. We consider bi-directional carousels under a ‘floating’ dwell point strategy. Two important performance measures considered are system capacity (maximum throughput) and job sojourn time. We also investigate the effect of activity skew on system performance.