Online heuristics for unloading boxes off a gravity conveyor

Baptiste, Pierre; Bürgy, Reinhard; Hertz, Alain; Rebaïne, Djamal

doi:10.1080/00207543.2016.1229073

Cited by 1 publication

(14 citation statements)

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“…In this section, we first review some properties of the set of moves established in Baptiste et al (2017) and then describe a generic online algorithm.…”

Section: A Generic Online Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proposition 3 (Proposition 4 in Baptiste et al 2017) If ðp; 'Þ is a move in RðC; A; FÞ such that c i 6 ¼ c p for all i 2 f1; . .…”

Section: Valid Dominant and Optimal Movesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The online algorithm in Baptiste et al (2017) uses Proposition 3 only if jCj A þ V since this is the only case where it can be said that there are no boxes of a given color in the invisible area. The knowledge of the number n c of boxes of color c in the invisible area makes it possible to also apply Proposition 3 when…”

Section: Valid Dominant and Optimal Movesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They observe that the results are typically more than 20% above the optimal value, and conclude that rules of common sense may give an unsatisfactory performance. Based on this study, Baptiste et al (2017) developed an algorithm that produces results with an average gap of about 6-8% to the optimum. Interestingly, the basic principles of their approach can easily be applied in practice by human operators without the need of a computing device.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As the total number of boxes for each destination is typically known in practice, we include this information and ask if and how this additional information can be exploited to improve the online approach discussed above. This research direction was also mentioned in Baptiste et al (2017). The main contribution of this article is a scenario-based stochastic move evaluation scheme, which uses the additional information about the boxes in the invisible area to generate the scenarios.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A stochastic online algorithm for unloading boxes from a conveyor line

et al. 2017

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This article discusses the problem of unloading a sequence of boxes from a single conveyor line with a minimum number of moves. The problem under study is efficiently solvable with dynamic programming if the complete sequence of boxes is known in advance. In practice, however, the problem typically occurs in a realtime setting where the boxes are simultaneously placed on and picked from the conveyor line. Moreover, a large part of the sequence is often not visible. As a result, only a part of the sequence is known when deciding which boxes to move next. We develop an online algorithm that evaluates the quality of each possible move with a scenario-based stochastic method. Two versions of the algorithm are analyzed: in one version, the quality of each scenario is measured with an exact method, while a heuristic technique is applied in the second version. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms using extensive computational experiments and establish a simple policy for determining which version to choose for specific problems. Numerical results show that the proposed approach consistently & Alain Hertz

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“…In this section, we first review some properties of the set of moves established in Baptiste et al (2017) and then describe a generic online algorithm.…”

Section: A Generic Online Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proposition 3 (Proposition 4 in Baptiste et al 2017) If ðp; 'Þ is a move in RðC; A; FÞ such that c i 6 ¼ c p for all i 2 f1; . .…”

Section: Valid Dominant and Optimal Movesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Valid Dominant and Optimal Movesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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