Joint Optimization of Item and Pod Storage Assignment Problems with Picking Aisles’ Workload Balance in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

The item and pod storage assignment problems, two critical issues at the strategic level in robotic mobile fulfillment systems, have a strong correlation and should be studied together. Moreover, the workload balance in each picking aisle needs to be considered in the storage assignment problems to avoid robots’ congestion within picking aisles. Motivated by these, the joint optimization of item and pod storage assignment problems (J-IPSAP) with picking aisles’ workload balance is studied. The mixed integer programming model of the J-IPSAP with the workload balance constraint is formulated to minimize the robots’ movement distance. The improved genetic algorithm (IGA) with the decentralized pod storage assignment strategy is designed to solve the J-IPSAP model. The experimental results show that the IGA can obtain high-quality solutions when compared with Gurobi and the two-stage heuristic algorithms. The robots’ movement distance is smallest when the width-to-length ratio of the storage area is close to 1, and the robots’ movement distance will increase with more stringent workload balance constraints.