Scheduling and Controlling Multiple Vehicles on a Common Track in High-Powered Automated Vehicle Storage and Retrieval Systems

The ongoing trend towards increased throughput capacity and scalability of automated warehouses is pushing the application of rail-guided automated vehicle storage and retrieval systems (AVSRSs). By deploying more vehicles on each tier and lifting system, the performance and adaptability of these systems can be further increased. However, the transformation into high-powered AVSRSs requires advanced algorithms to run the system in a robust and efficient manner. In this work, an approach to schedule and control multiple vehicles on a common track by using a tier of a high-powered AVSRS is presented. By running computational experiments, it can be shown that the developed algorithm enables a collision-free and fast execution of transport tasks. By deploying several vehicles on a tier, the completion time of the transport tasks can be decreased and, hence, the throughput capacity of the tier can be increased.