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To meet customers' expectations on shorter lead times, high product availability, flexibility, and variation in delivery and return options, retailers have turned their attention to warehousing and are making big investments in technology. Currently, technology providers are pushing for smart warehousing, a new and under-researched phenomenon. This study aims to conceptualize the term and examine pathways toward implementing smart warehousing.

An exploratory survey was administered to 50 leading Swedish retailers in varying segments. A two-tailed t-test for equality of means was used to detect significant differences between current and future states.

The study found that future smart warehouses will be automated, autonomous, digital, and connected, but that retailers will follow different paths along this journey, driven by contextual trends, e.g. sales growth, wider product assortment, shorter lead-time offerings, and integration of brick-and-mortar and online stores. Interestingly, the study revealed that many of the retailers that aim to create smart warehouses in five years are not the retailers with the most developed technology today.

The paper operationalizes smart warehousing in two dimensions: degree of automation and degree of digitalization and connectivity of information platforms. Based on the findings, 16 theoretical propositions are put forth that, based on contextual factors, explain different pathways for retailers to implement smart warehousing.

The empirical insights and theoretical discussions provide practically useful guidance, including outlined trends, for selecting and benchmarking automation and complementary technologies in warehouse operations.

This paper conceptualizes and operationalizes smart warehousing – an original approach. It is also one of the first to investigate the technological transformation in retail warehousing empirically, explaining how and why retailers choose different pathways toward smart warehousing.

A bay configuration arranged along a central spine and served by an automated monorail material‐handling system are common designs for the layout and material‐handling system in new semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. Investigates the facility design problem in semiconductor fabrication facilities and proposes a procedure to determine the optimal spine layout design, given a design of the material‐handling system. Explains and tests the procedure to demonstrate the use of the model for solving semiconductor facility design problems. The procedure is applicable for the important semicondutor industry as well as in other facilities that use a central spine layout configuration.

Optimizing material handling within the factory is one of the key problems of modern assembly line systems. The purpose of this paper is to focus on simultaneously balancing a robotic assembly line and the scheduling of material handling required for the operation of such a system, a topic that has received limited attention in academia. Manufacturing industries focus on full autonomy because of the rapid advancements in different elements of Industry 4.0 such as the internet of things, big data and cloud computing. In smart assembly systems, this autonomy aims at the integration of automated material handling equipment such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to robotic assembly line systems to ensure a reliable and flexible production system.

This paper tackles the problem of designing a balanced robotic assembly line and the scheduling of AGVs to feed materials to these lines such that the cycle time and total tardiness of the assembly system are minimized. Because of the combination of two well-known complex problems such as line balancing and material handling and a heuristic- and metaheuristic-based integrated decision approach is proposed.

A detailed computational study demonstrates how an integrated decision approach can serve as an efficient managerial tool in designing/redesigning assembly line systems and support automated transportation infrastructure.

This study is beneficial for production managers in understanding the main decisional steps involved in the designing/redesigning of smart assembly systems and providing guidelines in decision-making. Moreover, this study explores the material distribution scheduling problems in assembly systems, which is not yet comprehensively explored in the literature.

Review of the most recent Automate and Promat shows in Chicago with emphasis on the new automation innovations and applications on display. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In-depth interviews with exhibitors of automation equipment and system integrators of automation technology at these dual shows.

Automation technology continues to address an ever increasing number of material handling applications.

Customers may be surprised at the automation innovations and new applications which are appearing in the material handling environment.

A review of some of the latest automation innovations and applications that one might have seen if they had been on the exhibition floor at the most recent dual Automate and Promat shows.

Automated material‐handling techniques have been successfully applied in industry for over a decade. The techniques and systems developed to automate warehouse operations directly apply to libraries. The problem of storing a growing mass of little used but “valuable” materials can be resolved by new material handling strategies, which will also generate improved library services. The characteristics of a miniload automated storage and retrieval system are described, and formulas are presented for calculating the size of system needed by a library. Also included are “rule‐of‐thumb” prices for calculating the approximate costs of a system of a specific size.

The paper aims to present the design, validation and integration of a universal fabric gripper. Flexible material handling is one of the most challenging problems occurring in the field of manipulator robots. Because textile products shape and properties can widely vary, each textile and each technological operation should have its own specialized gripper. The objective of the work described here is therefore to design a universal gripper able to grip and transfer every kind of textile.

The design objectives are the ability to handle panels of varying shapes and sizes without material deformation and/or folding, and the easy integration with commercially available manipulator robots. To answer initial requirements and increase the textile gripping reliability, we opted to combine three different gripping technologies: vacuum, intrusion and pinch.

Each system was first validated independently through static tests. The vacuum technology offers a high reliability to handle impermeable materials. The intrusion technology is reliable for the manipulation of high porosity materials, while the pinch technology shows good results for all soft fabrics when combined with the vacuum technology. Then, the limits of the new gripper in terms of gripping capacity, compressed air consumption and characteristics and limitations of the flexible material handled were put in evidence using a robot arm. An automated selection program of the gripper based on the material characteristics has also been developed and implemented.

This paper fulfills an identified need to design a universal gripper able to grip and transfer every different kind of cut textile.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of an architecture for real‐time routing of automated guided vehicles (AGV) in a random flexible manufacturing system (FMS).

AGV routing problem is modeled using an evolutionary algorithm‐based intelligent path planning model, which handles vehicle assignments to material handling requests and makes routing decisions with the objective of maximizing the system throughput. The architecture is implemented on a 3‐layer software environment in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

The proposed architecture, along with the evolutionary algorithm‐based routing model, is implemented in a simulated FMS environment using hypothetical production data. In order to benchmark the performance of the path planning algorithm, the same FMS model is run by traditional dispatching rules. The analysis shows that the proposed routing model outperforms the traditional dispatching rules for real‐time routing of AGVs in many cases.

Future work includes expanding the scope of the current work by developing and implementing other routing models and benchmarking them against the proposed model on different performance measures.

The implementation of evolutionary algorithms in real‐time routing of AGVs is unique. In addition, due to its modularity, the proposed 3‐layer architecture can allow effective and efficient integration of different real‐time routing algorithms; therefore it can be used as a benchmarking platform.

This paper aims to introduce novel linear synchronous motor (LSM) driven assembly automation and material handling system designs with examples.

Discusses novel LSM technology principles with some practical system design and configuration examples for automated assembly and material handling. The high energy density and rugged design offers high duty cycle, high power, rapid acceleration, improved speed, high positioning repeatability, and increased performance for demanding installations.

LSMs can increase throughput, reliability and payload information feedback. They can also decrease maintenance requirements, and the total cost of installation. MagneMotion's patented QuickStick system propels and controls each vehicle independently by interacting with a permanent magnet array mounted to each vehicle. As a consequence, the vehicles do not require communication or power cables, allowing a broad range of flexible, reconfigurable configurations and move profiles.

LSMs can increase throughput, reliability and payload information feedback. They can also decrease maintenance requirements, and the total cost of installation.

Discusses novel LSM technology principles with some practical system design and configuration examples for automated assembly and material handling.

Automated guide vehicles (AGVs) are driverless vehicles that perform material handling operations in both flexible and conventional facilities. We provide here a review of recent work on the design of AGV guide paths and dispatching rules, including related issues such as idle vehicle location, and location of pickup and delivery stations. Different types of guide paths and related layouts, including optimal and heuristic approaches to the path design, are reviewed here. Dispatching rules and algorithms, including zone control, are also proposed and compared with commonly‐used rules.