AS/RS dwell‐point strategy selection at high system utilization: A simulation study to investigate the magnitude of the benefit

There has been a high level of research activity on how to determine the optimal AS/RS dwell‐point strategy. One could presume that research activity in this area is high because it is believed that the dwell‐point location of the S/R machine (when idle) greatly affects the system response time. However, it is hypothesized that the difference between the performance of optimal versus simple dwell‐point strategies is marginal for systems where the response time needs to be minimized (i.e. when the system is highly utilized) due to limited opportunities to travel to a dwell‐point. Therefore, several dwell‐point strategies are investigated here through the use of simulation. It is concluded that the dwell‐point strategy has an insignificant impact on the relative system response time when the system is highly utilized (i.e. the percentage reduction is typically <2% and no more than 5% for highly utilized systems) and has an insignificant impact on the absolute response time (i.e. <10 s) for typical systems of any utilization level.