Energy Efficient Warehouse Management - A Greedy Optimization Approach

Warehouse management has become an important area of research under industrial internet-of-things paradigm. Warehouse management problems deal with the movement of items/goods in a time bound manner across different storage locations using the suitable mobile transport units. This paper proposes an energy efficient warehouse management problem in which the optimal assignment of mobile units is carried out between different storage locations while also optimizing the utilization of the storage space. The objective of the proposed energy efficient warehouse management problem is to minimize the sum of the energy costs associated with the storage locations and the energy costs associated with the transportation of items by the assigned mobile units. The proposed formulation has a mixed integer program structure and is solved using branch and bound solver. The results provide insights into the different factors which affect energy management of the warehouse. The results also show that the proposed approach achieves load balancing.