Aisle changing shuttle carriers in autonomous vehicle storage and retrieval systems

The objective of this study is to propose analytical travel time models for aisle changing shuttle carriers, which are capable of travelling in the horizontal and in the cross-aisle directions. The expressions for the single and dual command travel times have been determined assuming uniform distributed storage locations and the probability theory. A simulation model has been applied for the performance analysis of the proposed analytical models. The proposed models enable the calculation of the expected travel times for single and dual command cycles of the aisle changing shuttle carriers, from which the performance can be evaluated.