• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.30-38
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• 2016

Shuttle-Based Storage/Retrieval System (SBS/RS) is relatively new to industry. The system is in the category of Automated Storage/Retrieval System (AS/RS), but it is different in that the SBS/RS uses shuttles as Storage/Retrieval (SR) machine instead using a stacker crane. The shuttles are assigned to each tier on multi-tier system and operated for pick-up or drop-off order. Since the system can handle multiple orders simultaneously, it can provide much higher throughput than that of general AS/RS with single stocker crane. Thus, this new system is well fit to recent tendency of increasing small quantity batch production and orders. One of the drawback of this system is that it needs a lot of investment to set up. The efficient operation of the system would be one of the critical matters to increase economic efficiency of capital investment. In this study, we focused on the dwell point policy for shuttles to find efficient way of operating the system. There are four basic policies for the dwell point and we had simulation-based experiment for two different scenarios based on the speed of the shuttle and inter-arrival time of the loads coming to the system combined with four different policies. As it was mentioned above, this SBS/RS relatively new to the field and there is no such experiment shown on previous research and the study of dwell point policy for this SBS/RS could provide the direct comparison of each policy with different hardware specification; the capability of the system. The policy that achieves most efficient operation among the given environment is proposed and the usability of the system is discussed.