Shuttle-Based Storage and Retrieval System: A Literature Review

Abstract

While the e-commerce logistics industry is developing rapidly, its sustainable development has received certain attention. The ultimate goal of sustainable development is to achieve common, coordinated, fair, efficient, and multi-dimensional development. To promote the sustainable development of logistics, the automation technology of warehousing is undoubtedly an excellent breakthrough, since the automation technology can not only make the warehousing system efficient and with a low-error rate, but also affect the energy consumption of the warehousing system. This paper studies the Shuttle-Based Storage and Retrieval System (SBS/RS) in automated warehousing. Moreover, the paper classifies the existing literature into three categories: Physical design (including depth, configuration, and number of tiers); control strategy (including scheduling rules, storage strategies, scheduling command, and interference); and performance evaluation (including throughput, time, and energy). These categories are all factors that warehouse designers must consider when designing a system. Finally, this paper proposes future research directions for SBS/RS: Adding speed metrics, limiting buffer size, targeting space constraints, applying four-way shuttles, and increasing the carrying capacity of a single machine.

An analytical performance approach for RCS/RS with one robot serving multiple stack heights under a one-path relocation strategy

“…SBS/RS also have been a huge research topic since the variety of the systems is enormous. A literature review only within the last five years by Li et al 16 found 41 papers considering the framework topics of physical design, control strategy, and performance evaluation. Generally, a shuttle is installed for one tier within one aisle and transports the totes from/to the lift in front of each aisle (tier-captive, aisle-captive), enabling high throughput rates.…”

Balancing picking and outbound loading efficiency in an SBS/RS through a digital twin

“…The recent reviews of Kosanić et al (2018) and Li and Li (2022) highlighted that the most debated research stream in SBS/RS literature regards the design, evaluation and optimization of the picking process (Boysen et al 2019a, b;Cano et al 2023), i.e., studying the efficiency of automated warehouses in terms of local performance such as cycle time and/or energy consumption (Wang et al 2022;Lanza et al 2023). As an example, the combined evaluation of both cycle time and energy performance was proposed by Ekren et al (2018), which provided a tool for briefly computing such performance by giving input parameters such as number of tiers, shuttle and lifts velocity.…”

“…Ekren (2020a) presented a simulation-based study for properly designing SBS/RS considering both throughput and energy consumption metrics. We refer to Kosanić et al (2018) and Li and Li (2022) for more details on energy consumption studies of SBS/RS.…”

Low-Cost Automated Storage and Retrieval System for Chemicals Warehouses and Central Refrigerators

“…The article found that these three categories influence each other to some extent. It found that if the designer of the warehouse system wants to design the most reasonable sustainable warehouse, he needs to choose different strategies according to the performance requirements of the designed system [8].…”