Warehouses have always been an essential part of supply chains, but despite their fundamental role they were not seen as especially mission critical. With the advent of e-commerce, same-day ...deliveries, omni-channel retailing, and global supply chain disruptions, however, this assessment has changed, and today’s warehouses have evolved to technology-enriched fulfillment factories with strategic relevance. This paper traces the evolution of picker-to-parts and parts-to-picker warehouses from basic systems of the first generation, via extended system setups of the second generation, up to state-of-the-art robotized distribution centers of the third generation. Specifically, we highlight the most influential scientific contributions of the operations research (OR) community within each generation that have supported this evolution over the past 50 years. Beyond the historical perspective, we outline an agenda for the warehousing research of the future.
•We structure the evolution of warehousing systems into three generations.•We survey most influential research contributions for each generation.•A research agenda for future warehousing generations is outlined.
With the advent of e-commerce and its fast-delivery expectations, efficiently routing pickers in warehouses and distribution centers has received renewed interest. The processes and the resulting ...routing problems in this environment are diverse. For instance, not only human pickers have to be routed but also autonomous picking robots or mobile robots that accompany human pickers. Traditional picker routing, in which a single picker has to visit a given set of picking positions in a picker-to-parts process, can be modeled as the classical Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The more involved processes of e-commerce fulfillment, however, require solving more complex TSP variants, such as the clustered, generalized, or prize-collecting TSP. In this context, our paper provides two main contributions: We systematically survey the large number of TSP variants that are known in the routing literature and check whether meaningful applications in warehouses exist that correspond to the respective TSP variant. If they do, we survey the existing research and investigate the computational complexity of the TSP variant in the warehousing context. Previous research has shown that the classical TSP is efficiently solvable in the parallel-aisle structure of warehouses. Consequently, some TSP variants also turn out to be efficiently solvable in the warehousing context, whereas others remain NP-hard. We survey existing complexity results, provide new ones, and identify future research needs.
•This paper surveys routing problems in warehouses.•We focus on variants of the TSP in warehouses.•New and old complexity results for the parallel-aisle structure are provided.•We elaborate warehouse use cases and future research needs.
As e-commerce has become more prevalent, the required logistics operations are challenged by the greater demand for and higher complexity of order picking in warehouses. While goods-to-person (G2P) ...picking systems, such as robotic mobile fulfillment systems, are becoming popular, there are still challenges in G2P systems, including the unstable performance of human picking due to fatigue and human errors, and the constrained mobility of robots. To tackle these challenges, this article presents a new robotic storage and order picking system, which we call RubikCell. It leverages the strengths of existing warehouse systems and incorporates automatic dispensing, robot-to-goods picking, and pick-while-sort operations. In RubikCell, robots are equipped with trays to store and transport items for an order, instead of moving with heavy pods to workstations as in G2P systems. In addition, the concept of cellular warehousing (CW)-inspired by cellular manufacturing-aims to operate a large warehouse with smaller warehousing cells. This approach reduces the substantial traveling distances of robots, as they move within their dedicated warehousing cells rather than the entire warehouse. A mathematical programming model is developed to address the cell formation problem in CW. Lastly, the implementation of CW principles in RubikCell, forming Robotic CW Systems, renders e-commerce warehousing more flexible, scalable, and reconfigurable. Numerical experiments conducted on this innovative system have confirmed the effectiveness of the cell formation method.
Data Warehousing in the Age of the Big Data will help you and your organization make the most of unstructured data with your existing data warehouse. As Big Data continues to revolutionize how we use ...data, it doesn't have to create more confusion. Expert author Krish Krishnan helps you make sense of how Big Data fits into the world of data warehousing in clear and concise detail. The book is presented in three distinct parts. Part 1 discusses Big Data, its technologies and use cases from early adopters. Part 2 addresses data warehousing, its shortcomings, and new architecture options, workloads, and integration techniques for Big Data and the data warehouse. Part 3 deals with data governance, data visualization, information life-cycle management, data scientists, and implementing a Big Data–ready data warehouse. Extensive appendixes include case studies from vendor implementations and a special segment on how we can build a healthcare information factory. Ultimately, this book will help you navigate through the complex layers of Big Data and data warehousing while providing you information on how to effectively think about using all these technologies and the architectures to design the next-generation data warehouse. * Learn how to leverage Big Data by effectively integrating it into your data warehouse. * Includes real-world examples and use cases that clearly demonstrate Hadoop, NoSQL, HBASE, Hive, and other Big Data technologies * Understand how to optimize and tune your current data warehouse infrastructure and integrate newer infrastructure matching data processing workloads and requirements
Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and
secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's
most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records
...that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data
complex backs up and protects our most vital information against
decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and
government institutions whose power is also preserved in its
bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the
Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early
twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a
series of moments when Americans thought they were living just
before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared
racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family,
while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable
materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to
cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and
packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the
dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs
the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body,
life and digital afterlife.
Blockchain is a shared distributed digital ledger technology that can better facilitate data management, provenance and security, and has the potential to transform healthcare. Importantly, ...blockchain represents a data architecture, whose application goes far beyond Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain and has popularized the technology. In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as 'revolutionary' and 'disruptive', is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is 'fit-for-purpose' is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.
Joint application of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and ultrawideband (UWB) technologies in the intelligent warehousing management system is proposed. In this system, we regard forklift as ...infrastructure, and both the UWB mobile terminal (MT) and the RFID reader are mounted on the forklift. The RFID reader is used not only to read the information of goods but also to determine the goods' status of loading and unloading. The UWB MT is used to locate the forklift. The goods or pallets are labeled with RFID tags. Utilizing the integration of these two technologies, the dual goals of goods information and goods location perception are achieved. An <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">M/N </tex-math></inline-formula>-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">K </tex-math></inline-formula> sliding window method is proposed to determine the loading and unloading of goods in this article. Our experiments reveal that this novel method can quickly, accurately, and efficiently determine the states of the goods on the forklift. For the indoor localization, an algorithm is proposed based on RSS residual weighting (RRW). Experiments show that RRW can mitigate the nonline-of-sight error substantially compared with the conventional Taylor algorithm and recent Convex approximation algorithm. Finally, a real working practice in a warehouse of a company is introduced, and it illustrates the feasibility of the system.
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