High-density parking for autonomous vehicles.

In a common parking lot, much of the space is devoted to lanes. Lanes must not be blocked for one simple reason: a blocked car might need to leave before the car that blocks it. However, the advent of autonomous vehicles gives us an opportunity to overcome this constraint, and to achieve a higher storage capacity of cars. Taking advantage of self-parking and intelligent communication systems of autonomous vehicles, we propose puzzle-based parking, a high-density design for a parking lot. We introduce a novel method of vehicle parking, which leads to maximum parking density. We then propose a heuristic method to solve larger problems, and mathematically prove that the method produces near-optimal results. To improve layout designs reducing vehicular movements, we propose a use of a meta-heuristic algorithm integrated with a deep reinforcement learning method. Finally, to take advantage of these puzzle-based designs in large-scale, we propose a modular layout design. This design process consists of two steps: i) design of a high-density modular lot, which we call sub-lot, and ii) integration of these sub-lots into a large parking lot. We have conducted a set of experiments to determine which sub-lot size provide the best performance in terms of density and retrieval time

Keynote: The Small World of Material Handling Rearch

Keynote Addres

The Small World of Material Handling Research

Using data from 88 journals over an 8 year period, we investigate the relationships among researchers in material handling. We apply social network analysis to measure many attributes of the network, including papers published each year, papers published per author, number of collaborators per author, strength of collaboration between authors, and how influential an author is in the network. We observe that collaboration patterns in material handling follow a scale-free structure in the presence of some hub-like researchers. According to social network theory, these hub researchers facilitate rapid dissemination of knowledge in the network. We conclude that the scientific community in material handling indeed forms a “small world,” yet the level of connectedness is lower than in other scientific networks. We hope these findings will inspire new and increasing levels of collaboration in the discipline