Abstract
The operational planning of pickup and drop-off activities in warehouses is currently done either manually, or using simple heuristics. Yet, mathematically, routing forklifts or AGVs in a warehouse is partly similar to routing vehicles on the road. In stark contrast to the absence of research on planning of vehicles in a warehouse, research on vehicle routing has yielded a rich literature describing a wide range of problem variants and advanced algorithms to solve them. The innovation of this project lies in the fact that it is one of the very first attempts to exploit the similarities between both research domains in order to improve the state of the art in the operational planning of warehouse operations.
We focus on a specific vehicle routing problem (the full-truckload pickup and delivery problem) that has never before been studied in a warehouse context, take the best algorithms from the literature and adapt those algorithms to the specific requirements and constraints of AGV routing in a warehouse. We are the first to take such an approach. The resulting problem, that we have called the transport request scheduling problem (TRSP), along with its variants, will help warehouse managers and software developers of warehouse management systems in successfully planning their AGV operations.
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