AS/RS dwell-point strategy selection at high system utilization: a simulation study to investigate the magnitude of the benefit

There has been a high level of research activity on how to determine the optimal AS/RS dwell-point strategy. One could presume that research activity in this area is high because it is believed that the dwell-point location of the S/R machine (when idle) greatly affects the system response time. However, it is hypothesized that the difference between the performance of optimal versus simple dwell-point strategies is marginal for systems where the response time needs to be minimized (i.e. when the system is highly utilized) due to limited opportunities to travel to a dwell-point. Therefore, several dwell-point strategies are investigated here through the use of simulation. It is concluded that the dwell-point strategy has an insignificant impact on the relative system response time when the system is highly utilized (i.e. the percentage reduction is typically <2% and no more than 5% for highly utilized systems) and has an insignificant impact on the absolute response time (i.e. <10 s) for typical systems of any utilization level.