Rack shape and energy efficient operations in automated storage and retrieval systems

Energy efficiency has become a primary goal to be pursued for sustainable logistics. In automated storage and retrieval systems this leads to revise the traditional control policies aimed at picking time minimisation and to pay more attention to rack configuration, which has been not a research concern from the time-based perspective. Proper models for energy calculation should be developed by introducing new factors neglected in time analysis, such as the weight of unit loads and the differentiation of shifts along the horizontal and vertical axis as regard energy requirements, due to different contribution of gravity, inertia and friction. In this study, a classification of racks based on system height is proposed in order to select the proper crane specifications needed to compute the torque to be overcome by motors to serve a given location within a rack. An overall optimisation model based on Constraint Programming hybridised with Large Neighborhood Search is developed, allowing the joint application of the best control policies for storage assignment and sequencing both for time and energy-based optimisation, as well as the introduction of multiple weight unit loads and energy recovery. Simulations analysis is performed in order to assess the impact of the rack shape on energy saving. Results show how, regardless the demand curve and the optimisation objective, the best performances in terms of energy efficiency are reached by the intermediate height rack shapes, while the lower ones outperform when considering travel time performance.