Performance Estimating in an Innovative AGVs-based Parcel Sorting System Considering the Distribution of Destinations

With the increasing volume of parcel sorting in the warehouse, it is more and more important to improve the throughput of the warehouse. In this paper, for the parcel sorting system based on AGVs, the throughput of the system is estimated by building an M/M/s queueing model. Considering the distribution of parcel destinations, we divide the warehouse into a popular area and an unpopular area. The popular area is consists of workstations and containers with a circular layout, while the unpopular area is distributed far away from the workstations with grid layout. The throughput of the system is estimated by estimating the completion time of sorting a parcel by an AGV. In order to find out the number of AGV in two areas, we design a heuristic search algorithm. Through the numerical experiments, we analyze the influence of the circular sorting probability, the number of AGVs, the number of workstations, and the layout of containers on the system throughput. This study can provide some valuable insights for practical work.