• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.71-81
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• 2018

Forklifts in a shipyard lift and transport heavy objects. Tasks occur dynamically and the rate of the task occurrence changes over time. Especially, the rate of the task occurrence is high immediately after morning and afternoon business hours. The weight of objects varies according to task characteristic, and a forklift also has the workable or allowable weight limit. In this study, we propose an online forklift dispatching algorithm based on nearest-neighbor dispatching rule using minimal cost assignment approach in order to attain the efficient operations. The proposed algorithm considers various types of forklift and multiple jobs at the same time to determine the dispatch plan. We generate dummy forklifts and dummy tasks to handle unbalance in the numbers of forklifts and tasks by taking their capacity limits and weights. In addition, a method of systematic forklift selection is also devised considering the condition of the forklift. The performance indicator is the total travel distance and the average task waiting time. We validate our approach against the priority rule-based method of the previous study by discrete-event simulation.