Determining the I/O point policy in a robotic live-cube compact storage system

The robotic live-cube compact storage system can provide a higher storage capacity and more flexible throughput than other automated warehousing systems. The extant studies usually fix the input/output point at the bottom-left of such storage systems and have not investigated other configurations of the input/output point. In this study, we propose six policies for the configuration of the input/output point and evaluate their performance by using an analytical model and simulations. A sensitivity analysis is carried out by considering different shape-related factors, system heights, and energy consumption to explore the optimal configuration of the input/output point. For most input/output point policies, a shape factor (length divided by depth) of 0.5 results in good system performance in terms of retrieval time. When using optimal system dimension, the input/output point located in the upper-middle part along the length and depth performs best compared with other policies. Specifically, this configuration reduces the retrieval time by 40.23% and energy consumption by 42.31% compared with the bottom-left corner input/output point. We find that there exists a trade-off among the cost of setup, number of empty grids, and retrieval time when varying the number of input/output points.