Scheduling Of Handling Robots In Robotic Mobile Fulfilment System Considering Charging

In recent years,RMFS(Robotic Mobile Fulfilment System)has been used by more and more E-commerce companies to assist manual picking operation.RMFS is one of parts-to-picker systems.As an important equipment for picking operation,the scheduling of robots will become one of the key points of warehouse management.The scheduling results directly affects the efficiency of picking operation,especially when the scheduling is unreasonable,it is easy to cause order delays.E-commerce companies usually increase the efficiency of picking operation by increasing the number of robots to shorten the order completion time and to improve customer service satisfaction.However,the more robots used,the higher the cost of robots caused.So,E-commerce companies need to improve the picking efficiency while also considering the cost of robots,which means to reduce the cost of robots as much as possible while ensuring customers' satisfaction.Therefore,how to schedule robots by balancing the relationship between picking efficiency and robot cost has become an urgent problem for Ecommerce companies to solve,and it is also the problem studied in this article.In RMFS,the efficiency of picking operation is represented by the penalty cost of uncompleted orders,the cost of robots mainly includes depreciation costs of the robots and power consumption costs of the robots.Since the robot stops working when it is charging or malfunctioning,so the scheduling of robots needs to consider the impact of charging and malfunctions under considering the trade-off between picking efficiency and cost.In addition,different charging rules have different working hours and charging times,so companies need to compare different charging rules.In order to solve the scheduling of RMFS robots considers charging,this paper aims to minimize the comprehensive cost of penalty cost,robot depreciation cost and robot power consumption cost.Considering the constraints of warehouse working time,robot working time and the relationship between charging time and working time under specific charging rules,this paper has constructed one robot scheduling model considering charging,and Genetic Algorithm is used to solve the start time of each shift and the number of robots in the model.Finally,parameters such as order completion rate,charging rules and charging rate are changed for sensitivity analysis,and the influence of different factors on the scheduling results was explored.The results of this paper shows that the scheduling model of the RMFS robots considering charging can effectively increase the picking rate and reduce the cost of the robots,and charging also affects the scheduling results.This paper provides new idea of robot scheduling for E-commerce companies,and has practical significance for reducing costs while increasing efficiency.There are 17 figures,15 tables,72 references in this paper.