IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation (Under Revision) A Hybrid Scheduling and Control System Architecture for Warehouse Management

Abstract

Abstract-- In recent years, the hybrid control framework has received much attention from the research community. Several variations of this control framework are available. In this paper, an actual industrial warehouse order picking problem where goods are stored at multiple locations and the pick location of goods can be selected dynamically in near real time, is considered. A hybrid intelligent agent based scheduling and control system architecture is presented for the order picking problem. The need for a higher level optimizer and communication between higher and lower level controllers is demonstrated. The presented architecture includes a higher level optimizer, a middle level guide agent, and lower level negotiation agents. A mathematical model and a genetic algorithm for the resource assignment problem are presented. Simulation results demonstrating efficiency of the new approach are also presented. Index Terms-- Hybrid framework, intelligent agent, warehouse managemen