Agent-based material handling and inventory planning in warehouse

Abstract

Agent technology has become popular in the last few years as an effective approach to develop software and hardware systems. Our research applies this technology to warehouse systems. Since warehouse system is crucial to the success of supply-chain systems, objective of our research is to implement a framework of warehouse system based on the agent technology. This paper proposes an agent-based model for warehouse system, which is called AWAS (Agent-based model for WArehouse System). AWAS is composed of three subsystems, or agent-based communication system (ACS), agent-based material handling system (AMATH), and agent-based inventory planning and control system (AIPCON). These subsystems are designed to cooperate together to facilitate just-in-time exchange of orders and materials. Under these subsystems, seven kinds of basic agents are defined, including customer, supplier, order, inventory, product, supplier-order, and automatic-guided vehicle (AGV) agents. We will describe our approach in designing and implementing warehouse systems simulation with agents. Using a prototype system which was developed based on the model, the paper presents some results of simulation to show the validity of the model.