SingleBatch: Warehouse Vehicle Routing SaaS

As with many autonomous systems related projects, the scientific challenge is derived from a use-case that aims to exploit the possibilities of autonomous, intelligent agents. The use-case in this proposal is delimited to the development of scalable high level planning capabilities to minimize travel costs in warehouses with static rack layouts. Travel accounts for a large portion of energy use in warehouses and minimizing it is therefore important not just from an economic but also from a resource efficiency and sustainability point of view. There are three warehouse research domains that are addressed to fulfill the goal:
1 How to create warehouse datastructures needed for planning (digitization).
2 How to assign locations for pick items (Slotting).
3 How to assign orders and compute trajectories for vehicles (the Joint Order Batching and Picker Routing Problem, referred to as OBP).

Imagine a warehouse where dozens of autonomous vehicles drive around to pick shipment orders for delivery. The goal of the vehicles is to complete as many picking requests as possible while at the same time traveling as little as possible. There are multiple problems of varying complexity that need to be addressed to minimize travel. One is the Layout problem, which is about where the warehouse racks should be placed so that vehicles can move smoothly without getting stuck in traffic jams. Another is Slotting, which is about assigning locations to all the items that are to be stored in the warehouse. A third is the so called Order Batching Problem (OBP) which is about how the vehicles should navigate around the warehouse to pick sets or batches of items. An additional but no less relevant problem is how to integrate software that optimizes the above problems into existing Warehouse Management Systems with ease and safety. This project is delimited to the development of formulations and optimization services to the OBP and Slotting, building and sharing benchmark datasets for these on a highly standardized format (tsplib) and discussing how these types of tools fit into the paradigm of Physical Internet and how they will be used by the warehouses of tomorrow.