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The travel time in carousel systems under the nearest item heuristic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Nelly Litvak*
Affiliation:
EURANDOM
Ivo Adan*
Affiliation:
Eindhoven University of Technology
*
Postal address: EURANDOM, PO Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Email address: [email protected]
∗∗ Postal address: Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Abstract

A carousel is an automated warehousing system consisting of a large number of drawers rotating in a closed loop. In this paper, we study the travel time needed to pick a list of items when the carousel operates under the nearest item heuristic. We find a closed form expression for the distribution and all moments of the travel time. We also analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the travel time when the number of items tends to infinity. All results follow from probabilistic arguments based on properties of uniform order statistics.

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © by the Applied Probability Trust 2001 

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